Barack Hussein Obama....

Peace In Our Time
This takes a lot of the heat off. The big question is, who nominated him. Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Mullah Omar?

Hang on, he hasn’t actually accomplished any peace, or much else yet, though he has had several schools named after him and has promoted accord to the extent schoolchildren weren’t pelting each other with spitballs while they were singing about him.

It’s well established that the Nobel Peace Prize judges don’t require any actual peace (Jimmy Carter), any intention of fostering peace (Yasser Arafat) or even more than the stated desire to thwart a highly theoretical future conflict (Al Gore) as preconditions for bestowing the coveted prize. In fact, if you look at some of the prior nominees (Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin) you can see that rampant imperialistic war-mongering gets you in the game. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee members have set the bar of conditions approximating peace very high in recent years and are now in the position of having to top themselves.

Giving the award to a president who is in the process of or on the verge of ceding to belligerents in at least three highly volatile geopolitical arenas neatly accomplishes that, and coming at the beginning of Obama’s term, will encourage people view his actions and their consequences in terms of “peace.”

It also makes up for the gross slight to Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

OK, enough kidding around. Here’s what he actually got it for:

“ … his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”

Jinx! Ha ha, no really, just kidding. So it turns out that box set of DVDs was more considered than all the wags thought. Looks like the committee’s reasoning also encompasses keeping his yap shut while the Basij militia was striving for cooperation between people in Tehran’s Azadi Square last June.

HotAir: “In other words, they gave him the prize for being Hopenchange-y.”

Michael Graham: “What do Barack Obama and Yasser Arafat have in common? They both hung out with anti-Semites who think Israel should be pushed into the sea.” That and … you know.

Riehl, with the full text, cautions, “Try not to throw up in your mouth!”

Reynolds, hurtfully, “Not bad for a guy who’s been acting like Bambi caught in the headlights of hstory.”

Hyscience: “Obama’s Ignoble Prize …” No no, the “Ig Nobels” are those joke awards they give away for silly … never mind.

Spoilsports at the Times of London: “Absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize.” Too late, observes Reynolds.

Tweet, via Tigerhawk: “YO OBAMA, I’M GONNA LET YOU FINISH, BUT I JUST WANNA SAY THAT MARTIN LUTHER KING JR WAS THE BEST NOBEL PRIZE WINNER OF ALL TIME.”

Before we go anywhere, with the Nobel Peace Prize, I think something should be said in defence of Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain has received a bad press, these last 70 years, though famously it was a good press after he signed the Munich agreement 71 years ago with Adolf Hitler, and flew home to England promising, "Peace in our time." Let us grant, the result of his policy of appeasement was not what he intended; and let us allow, that Hitler negotiated in bad faith.

(Historical aside: Chamberlain flew home to the Heston aerodrome, not Croydon as often misremembered. And he waved his little agreement, signed by the Fuhrer and himself -- and worth considerably more than the paper it was written on, should it ever come up for auction at Christie's -- not upon disembarking, but a little later, outside 10 Downing Street.)

Alas, Chamberlain -- child of an illustrious Liberal political family, a dynasty that made Birmingham proud -- who for one gleaming

moment in an otherwise non-illustrious political career, became the pulsating superstar of statesmanship, all the world round -- proved an unlucky man.

He was not nearly so stupid as history has painted him; indeed, he could probably have matched Barack Obama in IQ. He was perfectly aware that Hitler was "nuts," as we say in the colloquial, just as I'm sure Obama today is aware that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is playing with too many missiles and not enough sense.

Chamberlain was also aware that, unlike the U.S. today, Britain and allies were woefully underprepared for war. This was the result of the ascendancy, through the 1930s, of the pacifist mindset, which holds that because war is unthinkable, we must never think about war. People in England were under the impression that if another world war began, they would all be killed -- and what would be the point of that? They believed the new bombers could achieve the devastation that people in the 1960s attributed to nuclear weapons, and people today to asteroids and global warming.

But Chamberlain was not so ill-informed. He probably grasped the disposition of forces as well as did a certain Winston Churchill, the notorious war-monger whom he held in distaste. He may even have realized that war was inevitable, though as a typical politician he thought he could hold it off until after his term in office.

In the event, he could not hold it off. All he had succeeded in doing was cutting the throat of an important ally, Czechoslovakia, and giving away the Czechs' formidable defences in Sudetenland. It was, finally, Chamberlain himself who declared war on Sept. 3, 1939.

A broken man; and the fact he was broken paradoxically argues well for him, as for all his pride Chamberlain had a conscience, and knew how badly he had failed. His last public act was trying to

manoeuvre Lord Halifax into office to replace him, to keep that crazy Churchill out of power. And praise the Lord, that didn't work, either.

Events spiralled out of Chamberlain's control so fast that the Nobel committee in Oslo were never able to offer him their peace prize -- although they had already given it to his half-brother, Sir Austen, for his work on the Locarno treaties; including the one Hitler casually abrogated when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936.

It is also perhaps worth exculpating Alfred Nobel, for the farce his peace prize has become. The man took various precautions in his will to make sure it would not be cheaply politicized, and specifically that it would never be used as a means to influence current events. It was to be a retrospective award, for specific accomplishments universally acknowledged, and thus the opposite of a partisan statement. But Nobel's will was written in 1895, by the brilliant entrepreneur who converted a failing iron and steel mill into an extremely successful munitions factory. And as students of philanthropy should know, "good intentions" generally go the way of the Munich agreement.

In this case, I don't think a fix was in. There is broad speculation, among the sort of people I hang out with, that it was offered to Obama on the understanding that he would "do a Le Duc Tho," and decline it, thus showing the world his immense strength of character. (But how can such a narcissist pass up the opportunity to give a Nobel Prize speech?)

Instead, I think the intention of the prize, for which nominations closed on Feb. 1 -- less than a fortnight after Obama took office -- is in fact designed as an essay in pre-emption. The left-wing, pacifist committee wanted to saddle the new U.S. president with their little "hope diamond," in case he got any ideas about killing more jihadis in Afghanistan. Or hesitated to do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain did to Czechoslovakia.

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- In a decision as shocking as Friday's surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.

While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he's been in office, the same clearly can't be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

Obama reacts to NobelPresident Obama says he was surprised and humbled by the honor. Video courtesy of Fox Business News.
From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care "reform" act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.

Yet the Nobel panel chose instead to award the prize to two obscure academics -- Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson -- one noted for her work on managing collective resources, and the other for his work on transaction costs. See full story on the Nobel winners.

Other surprise losers include celebrity noneconomist and filmmaker Michael Moore; U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and Larry Summers, head of the U.S. national economic council.

It is unclear whether the president will now refuse his peace prize in protest against the obvious slight to his real achievements this year.

The Nobel Peace Prize, already devalued, has sunk to a new low. This assessment has nothing to do with one's estimation of this year's recipient, President Barack Obama. Most of those on the left, with a few predictable exceptions such as the New York Times, regard giving the president the award as belittling him and the prize.

How did this happen? What was the Oslo Committee's motive?

They may be moral idiots, but they are not stupid: I believe that they had two clear aims.
One is to undercut American exceptionalism -- the notion that America has a superior moral value system to that of the "world" (specifically the United Nations and the European Union) and America's willing to use its unique power, alone when necessary, in accordance with that value system. The other is to promote an essentially pacifist agenda.

Here is the entire announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize committee:

1. "The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Meaning: No more Lone Ranger America.

2. "The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."

Meaning: The Nobel Committee wants no country to possess nuclear weapons. That an American president shares this dream and is working to achieve it excites the Nobel Committee -- and the world's left generally -- beyond words.

Many people around the world -- not just Americans -- would characterize a world in which America and all other decent countries had no nuclear weapons not as a dream, but as a nightmare. But for the naive left-wing (a redundant phrase: If one is not naive about evil, one is not on the left) members of the Nobel Committee, the prospect of encouraging an American president to dismantle his country's nuclear arsenal was too tempting to allow to pass -- even at the price of appearing foolish.

3. "Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play."

Meaning: To the international left, as embodied by the five members of the Nobel Prize Committee, the United Nations is the beacon of hope for mankind.

To many Americans and others, however, the United Nations is regarded as a moral wasteland that rewards some of world's cruelest regimes with seats on its Human Rights Committee, does nothing to prevent genocides (some would way say the U.N. actually abets them), honoring tyrants, and mired in corruption.

4. "Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts."

Meaning: As the pacifist bumper sticker puts it: "War is not the answer."

Oslo's approach echoes what the British government under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed vis a vis Adolf Hitler. But had Hitler been confronted instead of "dialogued" with, perhaps tens of millions of innocent men and women's lives would have been spared and the Holocaust averted. Europeans tend to believe that evil regimes will act responsibly because of dialogue, not threats of force.

5. "The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations."

Meaning: We believe that a world in which no country possesses nuclear weapons will be a safer world. We believe that even though the technology to make nuclear weapons will still exist, no terrorist organization, nor any other bad people, will make such weapons.

The existence and deterrent power of nuclear weapons have probably saved as many lives as have antibiotics. As David Von Drehle writes in this week's Time Magazine, "If the Nobel committee wants someday to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, they will award a peace prize to the bomb."

6. "Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting."

Meaning: To our delight, unlike the previous president, this one believes in global warming and in changing the American economy to combat it.

The "climate change" scare has become the most effective vehicle for compelling a transformation of Western economies along the lines that left-wing environmentalists have urged for decades.

7. "Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

This, unfortunately, has no meaning; it is nonsense. Under Barack Obama, the United States has not been the friend of democrats around the world. America has responded weakly to the democratic movement in Iran, ended the funding of the largest pro-Iranian human rights groups in America, pressured democratic Israel, made overtures to Hugo Chavez while denying American ally and pro-democratic Colombia a free trade agreement, abandoned Honduran anti-Chavez democrats, and has obsequiously deferred to Vladimir Putin.

8. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."

Meaning: Only very rarely does the European left have such a kindred spirit in the American presidency.

9. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

Meaning: With Barack Obama, we in Europe finally have an opportunity to end American exceptionalism.

The Oslo committee's view is, tragically, true. Thanks to Barack Obama, America is for the first time is aligning its values with those of "the majority of the world's population." If you think the world's population has had better values than America, that it has made societies that are more open, free, and tolerant than American society, and that it has fought for others' liberty more than America has, you should be delighted.

http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2009/10/13/why_president_obama_was_awarded_the_nobel_prize