NBC, the Obama network, is shamelessly promoting the canard that Michelle Robinson Obama is the Black Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is the Black John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

        As political strategy, it is understandable.  But it's outrageously flattering to the Obamas and dangerously deceptive--like the Obama campaign.

        In Michelle's case, being the wife of a young United States senator who aspires to be president of the United States and having two engaging young children makes it necessary to scrutinize the comparison instead of reject it out of hand.

        But, the comparison cannot withstand scrutiny: Jackie was not a lawyer whose compensation skyrocketed after her husband was elected to the United States Senate, and Jackie did not write a college thesis pledging to put any particular race or group "first and foremost."  Michelle (Black-community-first-and-foremost) Obama did precisely that in her senior thesis at Princeton and, understandably, being a member of black-liberation-theology-proponent Reverend Jeremiah A. (God-damn-America) Wright, Jr.'s Trinity United Church of Christ for so many years, did not enlighten her.

        The much more important question, of course, is whether Barack is a ''Black JFK.''

        JFK's father was an adulterer, too, but not a Muslim or a Marxist, of course.

        JFK's mother was a devout Catholic, not an atheist.

        Both Barack and JFK studied at Harvard and chose political careers.

        But JFK served first in the United States Navy during World War II, while Obama skipped military service.

        The biggest differences are that JFK had much more congressional service before he announced that he was a presidential candidate, he did not run for president as a dove, he claimed that the prior administration had not been strong enough on national defense, and he favored tax cuts at the top to boost the economy.

        In those critically important respects, Barack certainly is no JFK.

        But, as JFK did, Barack is running for president as a young United States senator and good family man.

        And, as it did with JFK, the media prefers him to his Republican rival.

        Ironically, the mere possibility of an Obama victory may lead to an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, either before Election Day 2008 or after the election and before Inauguration Day 2009.

        Jews learned from the Holocaust, their "Never Again" vow is not hollow and they know that it would be better for Israel if President George W. Bush is in the White House instead of Barack if Israeli needs to add Iran to the list of countries whose nuclear facilities Israel has destroyed.  (Currently, Iraq and Syria are on the list.)

        Tragically, as Kennedy did, Obama would inspire challenges to American security and world peace instead of discourage them.

        From Former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in ''Khrushchev Remembers,'' translated and edited by Strobe Talbott (1970):

        "We assumed that the West didn't want to start a war and our assumption turned out to be correct. Starting a war over Berlin would have been stupid.  There was no reason to do so.  Our establishment of border control in the GDR didn't give the West either the right or the pretext to resolve our dispute by war.

        "By this time President Kennedy was in the White House.  Not long before the events in Berlin came to a head, I had met Kennedy in Vienna.  He impressed me as a better statesman than Eisenhower.  Unlike Eisenhower, Kennedy had a precisely formulated opinion on every subject....I joked with him that we had cast the deciding ballot in his election to the presidency over that son-if-a-bitch Richard Nixon.  When he asked me what I meant, I explained that by waiting to release the U-2 pilot Gary Powers until after the American election, we kept Nixon from being able to claim that he could deal with the Russians; our ploy made a difference of at least half a million votes, which gave Kennedy the edge he needed.

        "Actually, I had met Kennedy two years before, during my visit to America, when Lyndon Johnson introduced me to the young senator at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee reception in my honor.  I was impressed with Kennedy.  I remember liking his face, which was sometimes stern but which often broke into a good-natured smile.  As for Nixon, I had been all too familiar with him in the past.  He had been a puppet of [Joseph] McCarthy until McCarthy's star began to fade, at which point Nixon turned his back on him.  So he was an unprincipled puppet, which is the most dangerous kind.  I was very glad Kennedy won the election, and I was generally pleased with our meeting in Vienna.  Even though we came to no concrete agreement, I could tell that he was interested in finding a peaceful solution to world problems and to avoiding conflict with the Soviet Union.  He was a reasonable man and I think he knew he wouldn't be justified in starting a war over Berlin."

        The truth is that Khrushchev figured after meeting JFK in Vienna in 1961 that JFK was weak and so the Soviet Union could install offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba.

        Khrushchev's belief that he could "roll" the "reasonable" young American president nearly caused World War III in 1962 by trying to do so.

        Obama's rookie mistake, rightly criticized by many, including his Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, of offering to meet as president and without preconditions with the world's worst dictators is precisely the stuff on which miscalculations such as the miscalculation Khrushchev made are based.

        `Barack is no JFK, and JFK was a dangerous president because Khrushchev perceived him as weak.

        Barack's election would be even more dangerous for America and the world.

        Finally, like JFK, Barack is trying to win the [residency by keeping from the American people his whole story and cleverly claiming that his critics are bigoted.  (JFK's campaign chided his opponents for being anti-Catholic, while Team Obama treats criticism as racist.)

        In 1960's, the American voters did not know of JFK's quietly annulled first marriage, or his Addison's disease, or his medications, or his affairs.

        Do today's American voters know all they should know about Barack?

        Of course not.