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George Jonas: A trip down Jimmy Carter's memory lane

[George Jonas writes for the National Post.]

'If politicians lied all the time, you could figure them out. But you can't rely on it," I remember my father saying to me. "Sometimes they blindside you by telling the truth."

I should have listened to him.

Canadians don't vote in American elections; they only suffer the consequences. Still, had I suspected that Barack Obama is telling the truth, I wouldn't have been so nonchalant about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's onetime parishioner becoming the leader of what used to be the free world.

As a candidate, Obama ran on a platform of "change." It didn't worry me because I didn't think he meant it. When he stayed resolutely on message, I wrote that yes, Obama's platform is change: When elected, he'll change from senator to president. Granted, that's no small step for him, but it wouldn't necessarily be a giant step for mankind.

Well, I was wrong. The new White House has been crying havoc and unleashing the dogs of war on free enterprise, using a big bump in the economic road for a casus belli. The changes President Obama is contemplating domestically include a shift from private to public enterprise and from a market to a command economy. Not exactly piffle, but they're dwarfed by changes in foreign policy. Obama is calling for trips down memory lane, not just from George W. Bush to Bill Clinton or from Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter, but all the way back to the 1960s.

I did write last year that Obama could turn out to be a remanufactured video of Jimmy Carter, but I should have added "if we're lucky." If we're not, he might prove to be a black-and-white kinescope of Eugene McCarthy, circa 1968.

We haven't been lucky, it appears. We're back to Ban the Bomb.

Well -- and what's wrong with that? The bomb, scary in anyone's hands, is about to fall into evil ones. Why not just do away with it? Some would call it a no-brainer.

Indeed it is, but in the opposite direction. Uninventing (disinventing?) nuclear weapons might be a splendid idea, except it cannot be done. What Obama contemplates is outlawing them, which is a bad idea...
Read entire article at National Post