49 years ago today, Barry Goldwater shook up the 1964 presidential contest by proposing that the United States use low-yield nuclear weapons in Vietnam. (The reaction led to a Ronald Reagan commercial defending Goldwater’s love of peace). In memory of that magic moment, here’s Randy Newman performing “Political Science” thirty years after that, in Berlin:

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Ed Kilgore, a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, is a columnist for New York.