Obama and the Nobel Prize

October 10, 2009
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A LOT OF HOT AIR? The sidebar reads: “Bomb kills 49 in Pakistani market,” while the big color photo shot through the window of the Oval Office shows Obama on the phone smiling broadly. This is the front page of today’s L.A. Times here in La La Land. But what could better exemplify the cluelessness of the Scandinavian Nobel Committee and of Obama’s foreign policy than this above-the-fold juxtaposition?
 

Obama’s “post-American-world” foreign policy, along with his apology tour and the misguided Cairo speech about Islam, all evince in the mind the image of a man who has little contact with the world’s reality. The world is far more dangerous, violent, incorrigible, and totalitarian than he is willing to admit, and his A-mea-rica culpa philosophy will help those renegade forces. I feel apprehension about a global shift in power during his administration, much as we saw take place during the administration of Jimmy Carter.

 

The Nobel Committee (not a group of people known for detailed contact with reality, mind you) has done something cheap and irresponsible in awarding the Peace Prize to someone for what he merely intends to do, or for what the Committee would wish him to do, as if the prize were a bribe for future services rendered. (Jean-Paul Sartre won the Nobel for Literature in the sixties, but refused to accept lest he be compromised in his future work.)

 

Well…..it’s obvious that the Peace Prize is now completely motivated by a political agenda, and that the Committee has given a tawdry, discredited patina to their own once-magnificent prize. First they give it to Rigoberta Menchu, a clear fraud who made things up, and now they give it to a man simply because they want him to grow into it, to deserve it in the future. I think the Land of the Midnight Sun needs to start wearing a hat.

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