Friday, October 9, 2009

Embarrassing the President

As you have probably heard by now President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ........ well, I don't exactly know what for, but anyway, the Nobel committee saw fit to give it to him. The prize has been awarded in the past to such peace-loving souls as Yassar Arafat so I don't know how much importance it carries.

I do hope, though, that President Obama is embarrassed by the honor. He knows that at this stage in his presidency he has done nothing to merit it and that accepting it makes him look silly. That's not his fault, of course, but I think that if the Nobel committee had wanted to make him risible in the eyes of the world they couldn't have done anything more likely to achieve that result than what they did.

And in the process they make themselves look ridiculous as well. In 2007 they had the choice of giving the prize to an elderly woman named Irena Sendler who had, as a young nurse, risked her life to smuggle dozens of Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Europe or give it to someone who made a film about global warming. They evidently thought the film was more important because they gave the prize to its maker, Al Gore.

The Peace Prize, evidently, has little to do with peace and everything to do with left-wing politics. The prize committee has made themselves, their award, and its recipient, laughingstocks.

RLC