Obama's Nobel: I Saw This And Thought It Was A Joke (UPDATED)

But then I remembered that they also gave one to Jimmy Carter.

And Al Gore.

And Yasser Arafat.

And I said to myself, "yeah, makes sense."

Like Ace said, somewhere (h/t Matt L.):

High school kids want to be popular. Nations want to be prosperous, secure and in America's case, a force for good in the world.

And like Bob & Tom said on the radio this morning (also, h/t Matt L.):

isn't this a bit like awarding super bowl MVP right now?

&

The Europeans are so mad that they weren't the ones to elect Barack Obama.

Or, like My Old Man said:

Is today April 1? This shows what a joke this [the Nobel Peace Prize] is.

But wait, there's more: I just got an invite to join someone's Facebook group (yup, I'm popular too): Help Barack Obama win the Heisman Trophy!

Then, of course, there's this: Nobel Peace Prize For Awesomeness

This is so utterly ridiculous, I almost wonder if this is a send-up of Obama. But then I remember how seriously these Nobel folks take themselves and realized that no, it is not a joke.

This is so outrageous, I almost feel bad for President Obama--I mean, this makes two weeks in a row that the Europeans (who are more in love with him, even, than the leftists) have made a clown of our President.

For shame. Does the office of the President of the United States mean nothing to these people?

UPDATE 10 October 1:09am BDT: Jansen G. does me one better and writes something intelligent about Obama's Prize:

So, Obama got awarded a peace prize for yet another promise, this time for promising a nuclear free world. After having added this venerable achievement to his trophy case, I have to say, Obama has done quite well making promises. US Senator? Check. President of the United States? Check. Nobel Peace Prize? Check. Though, all this makes me wonder: are any of these promises contractually enforceable? Because I'm not seeing much, if any, performance.

As for the substance (if you can call it that) of this Nobel Peace Prize, Obama promised reconciliation in the M-E, climate change, and a world free of nuclear weapons. Has there been any performance of any of these promises? No! Obama's speech in Egypt has had little affect on the contentious realities in the M-E, largely b/c it failed to address the real source of conflict (US involvement in anything related to or impacting M-E oil flow).
Performance on climate change? The conference on climate change doesn't start until December and its a virtually guaranteed failure given the interests of BRIC et. al.

And while Obama may believe in the ideal of a nuclear free world, he knows just how dangerous in addition to impractical an ideal it is. No one in their right mind believes disarming nuclear arsenals will do anything but create even stronger incentives for horizontal proliferation, further destabilizing already pressing crises. And that's just the catch. Obama either (A) disingenuously attempts a halfhearted, impractical endeavor to dismantle nuclear arms resulting in planned failure that potentially destabilizes a system that's fenced-in the powerful incentives of the prisoner's proliferating dilemma, or (B) he abandons the thought of an attempt to rid the world of weapons and goes down as one of the world's most undeserved Nobel Peace Prize winners. The obvious and preferable option is B, to continue to indulge in the proven double standard of the "powers-that-be." But one has to think that eventually these myriad of catch-22's that Obama promises his way into will expose him for the 'serial breachor' of promises he is.

Obama is an archetype with which, thanks to teen movies, we are all familiar: the popular kool kid who only hangs out with the leftist dork when no one else is around. And then, because the dork has a crush on the kool kid, he/she endlessly makes excuses for Obama.

Obama's apologists will always have a reason for why he was/is unable to deliver on his sweet nothings.

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More On Krugman, NYT, & Nobel

From the Weekly Standard:

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday.
-- The New York Times, Oct. 13
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Krugman Awarded Economics Nobel Prize
In Unprecedented Times Sweep of Honors

By R. Selig Postlethwaite

Stockholm —The Nobel prizes have yielded some strange bedfellows in the century since Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, but scholars here in the Swedish capital agree that there has never been anything like this year’s list of honorees: All of them are New York Times Op-Ed page columnists.

This virtual grand slam home run of the world’s most prestigious award was made possible by the announcement last night that Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman had won the Economics prize for, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and the unrelenting lies and thuggery of the miscreants and goons in the criminal conspiracy that is the Bush White House.”

Krugman now joins New York Times colleagues Thomas Friedman (Peace), Frank Rich (Physics), Gail Collins (Chemistry), Maureen Dowd (Literature) and Bob Herbert (Medicine) as newly-minted Nobel laureates for 2008. According to the Nobel Foundation web site, this is the first time in the award’s history that journalists have won all six prizes; but that is not surprising, according to Foundation president Axel Hjergstrand, since “the mission of journalists is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”

Last week Maureen Dowd was awarded the Literature prize for her “unrelentingly sophomoric puns, schoolyard nicknames, and laser-like instinct for the superficial” while Gail Collins snared the Chemistry honors for “the explosive effect achieved by her combination of banality and short-term memory.”

Late last month the Nobel Committee bestowed its Physics prize on Frank Rich for “his pioneering work in demonstrating the parallels between American foreign policy and selected episodes of T.J. Hooker, as well as the relationship between U.S. transportation policy and the old Jerry Van Dyke sitcom, My Mother the Car.” The Medicine award went to Bob Herbert for what the committee called the “soothing sensation of his awkward prose, as well as the demonstrated therapeutic effect of the laughter his columns frequently inspire.”

Among colleagues and Nobel observers, there is widespread agreement that the Peace Prize for two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman is long overdue, especially since, in the Norwegian Nobel committee’s citation, Friedman’s “lifetime of service to conventional wisdom, gross simplification, and mass hysteria has benefited countless executive retreats, Aspen Institute panels, and roundtable discussions on Charlie Rose.”

Here's the rub: I don't care for Paul Krugman or his view of the world as found in his NYT columns. I'd like to be able to separate his work on economics from his much publicized opinions, but I don't think it's impossible.

Whatever one thinks of the Nobel Prize (apart from the tax free $1.4million, I think it's worthless), this type of thing imbues those opinions with an added gravitas which they do not merit. Because they are crap (his columns, I mean).


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Roger Kimball On Krugman's Nobel

This is great:

Think of all the preposterous Nobel Prize winners. Tony Morrison, Pearl S. Buck, Elfriede Jelinek, the Communist José Saramago–sure there are some goodies in the bunch, but what an unreliable guage of literary talent! Literary quality has almost nothing to do with the Prize. The operative criterion is politics, or, rather, political correctness, galvanized by literary noises. Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Prize, as much as acknowledged this a few weeks ago when he announced a couple of weeks ago that “the US is too isolated” and doesn’t “participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

Unlike Sweden, Horace?

As I said when asked about Mr. Engdahl’s statement, his performance reminded me of the story Uganda’s bravado under Idi Amin: Like the Untied States, they had an Apollo space program, only the rockets were made of balsa wood. Engdahl’s statement, I said,

strikes me as a kind of publicity stunt for a prize that in recent years has demonstrated its fatuousness and political complexion with one political laureate after the next punctuated now and then by a VS Naipaul just to lend a patina of credibility.

And let’s not forget the Nobel Peace, which permanently discredited itself when it awarded the palm to the Palestinian and pedophile Yasser Arafat in 1994.

But today we have yet another illustration of Marx’s revision of Hegel’s version of the progress of history: things happen as it were twice: first as tragedy (Arafat) then as farce–witness this year’s Nobel Laureate for economics: Paul Krugman.

Yes, that Paul Krugman, laughing stock (well, one of them) of The New York Times’s editorial: the anti-capitalist, anti-American town crier whose hysterical maunderings about the economy and American society were embarrassing before they went entirely off the reservation and became merely part of the ambient left-wing static emanating from The New York Times. Krugman is not just a left-wing academic economist. He is a hard-left activist whose only claim on our attention is as a bellwether of a certain species of anti-American demagoguery.

Well, one must laugh to keep from crying. Meanwhile, Krugman will be $1.4 million richer–unless, of course, Barack Obama should be elected and start nosing around that “windfall” profit. That is not–not by a long shot–enough to make me wish for an Obama presidency, but it would be a pleasing consolation prize.

Let's quit pretending that the Nobel Prize is something that it isn't. It may once have been prestigious and worthwhile, but not any more.


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