But What Do Sly And Robbie Think About Nuclear Containment?

At Commentary, Jennifer Rubin writes:

As J.E. Dyer pointed out, the Obama nuclear policy seems caught in a 1970s time warp — a faint echo of the nuclear-freeze gang, which shied away from looking at the nature of the regimes that possessed nuclear weapons. After all, it is not Israel’s widely believed possession of nuclear weapons that has panicked the region; it is the mullahs’ potential nuclear capability that has Israel and Iran’s neighbors in a quandary.

Call it yet another example of Barack to the Future, to coin a phrase. Meanwhile, at Power Line, Scott Johnson recently went back to Obama’s past, when the brilliant young collegiate student was referencing reggae artist Peter Tosh as a key spokesman in the dangerous world of Cold War nuclear brinksmanship:

Last year the New York Times reported that in 1983, as a Columbia undergraduate, Barack Obama was among the “useful idiots” expressing high-minded disparagement of Reagan’s defense policies. That’s not exactly how the Times put it, because Times reporters William Broad and David Sanger failed to supply the missing historical context that Charen’s book provides, and because the Times itself figures prominently among the “useful idiots” chronicled by Charen.

The Times article reported on Obama’s March 1983 article “Breaking the war mentality.” The Times noted that in the article Obama railed against discussions of “first-versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.

In his article Obama praised the nuclear freeze movement and celebrated the work of two groups: Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism. By Obama’s description of them, the groups were among the “useful idiots” promoting the Soviet line on Reagan’s build-up: “These groups, visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are shifting their weight into throwing America off the dead-end track.”

Obama expressed and dismissed a possible reservation regarding the “narrow focus” of the groups, citing the deep wisdom of Peter Tosh that “everybody’s asking for peace, but nobody’s asking for justice.” Heavy, man.

Of course, if George W. Bush had namedropped a pop or country star in a college term paper to support a view he still holds, this would have been front page news at the New York Times during the presidential campaign, not six months after it concluded.

A month ago, Nancy Pelosi famously said that Congress had to pass the ObamaCare bill “so that you can find out what is in it.” In a way, she had stumbled over the perfect metaphor for its namesake: since the press wasn’t going to tell us anything about him, I suppose they assumed we had to elect him in order to find out what was inside.

That seems like a stunt that the media and the DNC (but I repeat myself) can only do once in a generation; no wonder as we find out more about the man, his poll numbers continue to head southward, and his predecessor begins to look increasingly better in comparison.