WH Deputy Natl Security Adviser Tony Blinken re Putin’s intentions: “I honestly don’t know what his end goal is.” @npratc
— melissa block (@NPRmelissablock) March 3, 2014
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The Mystery of The Thesis – One of the latest reports on Obama’s missing thesis comes from, wait for it…, MSNBC, in 2008 – surprise. Written his senior year (and only year) at Columbia University, Obama’s thesis was presumably about Soviet nuclear disarmament. It’s only natural to wonder what the budding socialist turned presidential candidate thought of nuclear proliferation in the early 1980s.
“We do not have a copy of the course paper you requested and neither does Columbia University,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told NBC News.
The Obama campaign has been less than forthcoming with details. “Spokesman Ben LaBolt wouldn’t even say whether Sen. Obama threw out his copy or lost it.” At an earlier date, an aide actually told the New Republic the junior senator couldn’t recall what he had written about, but as that editor notes, “who doesn’t remember their senior thesis?” To get the inside scoop, MSNBC contacted the former professor who taught Obama’s senior seminar and who recalls the content of the paper better than Obama himself:
His former professor, Michael Baron, recalled in an interview with NBC News that Obama easily aced the year-long class. Baron described the paper as a “thesis” or “senior thesis” in several interviews, and said that Obama spent a year working on it. Baron recalls that the topic was nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.
“My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,” Baron said in an e-mail. “At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other. For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A.”
Perhaps all of those conversations from Occidental College with the former CIA operative turned professor came in handy. The professor was, after all, a close collegue of Zbigniew Brzezinski. [You’ll recall: At Occidental, Obama meets a professor of politics who is a CIA expert on the Soviet Union and an associate of Zbigniew Brzezinski] Looks like that association payed dividends.
*Another footnote: in 2009 another Obama writing was discovered by left leaning politico titled “Breaking the War Mentality“. It is a 1983 article attributed to Obama. It’s crap, for the most part. You’ll have to read it and decide for yourself.