Special Report: The Obama Nobel Peace Prize

Here at Smarter Than Y'all, we're particularly attuned to moments of cultural (and multi-cultural) insanity. Hence the Wal-Mart jibes and the complaints about vehicular scrotum. You can imagine our glee, then, at waking up this morning to the news that Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize, thus entering the proud company of an anti-semite, a beaurocratic stooge, and a terrorist. And that's just the last fifteen years! They didn't give out the prize between 1939 and 1943, but if they had, you can bet that one of them would have gone to Hitler.

Though Obama's "prize" (1.4 million dollars and a citation that half the world views as fraudulent on its best day) is stupid for a number of reasons, chief among them has to be the misplaced idealism and political symbolism that informed the council's decision. Consider the New York Times' take on the award--a take which, as usual, manages to combine startling canniness with breathless naivete:

In one sense, the award was a rebuke to the foreign policies of Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, some of which the president has sought to overturn. Mr. Obama made repairing the fractured relations between the United States and the rest of the world a major theme of his campaign for the presidency. Since taking office as president he has pursued a range of policies intended to fulfill that goal. He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons, as he did in a speech in Prague earlier this year; reached out to the Muslim world, delivering a major speech in Cairo in June; and sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

While a complete explication would involve more time than we're willing to commit, please note that although the Times has Obama "seeking," "making priorities," "pursuing," "intending,"
"vowing," "reaching out," and "seeking" (yet again), it doesn't have him achieving much of anything. Furthermore, the goals in question are patently unachievable. Or so sayeth history. A world without nuclear weapons? Peace in Israel? A permanent, meaningful repairing of America's "fractured" relations? Fool's gold, all of them. The province of poets, not presidents.

Only half a day into the story, commentators are already asserting that the Nobel committee's citation reads more like "a wish list" than a list of achievements. Those hoping Obama will decline the award, however, quite clearly fail to know our president.

-GM and JW