ON FOREIGN POLICY, IS ROMNEY THE NEW JFK? At PJM today, Roger L. Simon writes:

While reading the text of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Monday, I was suddenly plunged back to my Dartmouth College undergraduate days when JFK was president and we were in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I remember sitting in a Hanover Inn lounge (no TVs in the dorms in those days) with many fellow (all male) students, watching Kennedy make the speech in which he announced the blockade of Soviet ships heading for Cuba.

There wasn’t a peep in the room while we listened. Republicans, Democrats, even wannabe sixties radicals, we were all American citizens that night, listening to an admired president who was clearly standing tall against totalitarianism.

Afterwards I remember considerable discussion among the students about what we would all do. Nuclear war seemed imminent. Some, given the college’s Northern New England location, were plotting their escapes to Canada in the event of attack. I was not sure if they were serious. Probably they weren’t sure themselves. But again, no one — repeat: no one – questioned that we had a leader up to the task of defending our country against an enemy who sought to destroy our way of life.

Thanks in part to JFK’s resolve, and to the resolve of later presidents like Reagan, not to mention the resolve above all of the American people themselves, that enemy backed down and later dissolved. (Well, to some extent.)

It is very different now. We have a very different Democratic Party and a very different president. The man currently in the White House would prefer to blame amateurishly made video trailers for a world conflagration that clearly stems from an ideology as evil and bent on world domination as Soviet communism. And with arguably more adherents.

Read the whole thing.

At a minimum, Romney’s worldview is certainly much closer to the real JFK, as opposed to the cognitive dissonant wish-fulfillment Play-doh Fun Factory version the Left created for political expediency’s sake upon his assassination.