Friday, October 09, 2009

WTF: Obama Wins The Nobel Peace Prize?

I thought it was an article from the Onion at first. And then... "What?!"
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it gave the prize to Obama for his "efforts to strengthen international diplomacy," his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons" and for inspiring hope and creating "a new climate in international politics."

Emphasizing diplomacy ahead of force is a big improvement, but at this point it's mostly just rhetoric. He's only just started to accomplish something in Iran with diplomacy. Elsewhere, we're still fighting TWO wars and he's considering escalating one of them. He's effectively covered up and excused much of the previous administrations' torture and gross human rights violations and Guantanamo Bay remains open and running. He increased the size of the "defense" budget. He has spoken about ridding the world of nuclear weapons but not indicated how that could happen nor done anything about it. He has made no appreciable progress in Israel and Palestine.

Obama does not deserve this award. I hope that knowing he doesn't deserve it makes him feel obligated to earn it retroactively.

22 comments:

Baconeater said...

Now I have to put the Nobel voters in the same league as the UN. Completely useless.

Jack Steiner said...

It is bizarre and incomprehensible. Why would he want it right now. Would he really want to be in the company of Arafat and Carter.

mordyovits said...

It's really amazing: everyone I know had the same exact reaction, now matter where on the political spectrum they lay. I'm talking right-wing Evangelical Christians and left wing New York hipster atheists. This award is a total facepalm, a moment of rare agreement among everyone. Hey, maybe that's what the Nobel Peace Prize was for!

Apikores said...

I almost made a post with the exact same title. WTF indeed!

Although considering past peace prize winners (Yasser Arafat?) the bar to win one seems pretty low.

Anonymous said...

"obama nobel wtf" = 4.5 million Google results :D

Jewish Atheist said...

Anonymous:

LOL, that's hilarious. I see only 187,000 but that's still a whole lot of people with the exact same response.

Abandoning Eden said...

didn't he sign a nuclear arms reduction agreement with russia? (to get rid of something like 1/3 or 1/2 of all nuclear arms?) Or did that never make it to the US news? I don't know, no one is mentioning that, and it was a really big deal in Rome when I was there and this was all going down. So that seems like one thing at least. :)

OTD said...

I say he deserved it.

tommy said...

Humorously, Obama wasn't even in office two weeks before he was nominated. The due date for all nominations is the first of February. Obama became the sitting president January 20th.

didn't he sign a nuclear arms reduction agreement with russia?

He pledged to do so, but no action has been taken yet. This is a renewal of an existing agreement and it looks as if Obama will miss the deadline.

Peter Beinart had some surprisingly good comments on Obama's win.

Lisa said...

I think the Nobel Prize is an honor for the President, he was very gracious about accepting it.

Geonite said...

I agree. This is ridiculous. He's done nothing to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

cheap said...

President Obama deserve it....

tommy said...

If the day before the Nobel Committee announced that Obama had won the prize someone had claimed that liberals thought Obama deserved a Nobel, liberals who now support the decision would have scoffed.

Liberals make a mockery of themselves by defending what they would have called absurd and unwarranted had it never happened.

Theresa said...

My thoughts are that they must have meant to give it to Norman Borlaug but then he died a month too early and they musta picked the first name to pop in their heads.

Or it is like when there is a misbehaving child and one of the ways of correcting the child is to make a huge deal out of every tiny little thing they do right as a way of encouragement.

Either way, it removes some of the prestige from the prize.

JR said...

Borlaug did get the prize, I do not think they intended to give it to him a second time.

I do not like Obama getting it either. However other people have gotten it who deserved it even less. (Kissinger, Arafat to take two examples, or the Guatemalan women who faked her biography.)

If the award has any prestige after them getting it I am sure it will survive Obama as well.

Geonite said...

Obama was nominated about ten days after taking office. At that time he was still talking about closing Gitmo and getting us out of Iraq. If he had done those things I would say he deserves it. He has shown that he is all show and go. Until he actually does something tangible I will continue to say that he does not deserve this award.

Comrade Kevin said...

I think of it as being both a pat on the back and a manipulative tactic.

jewish philosopher said...

Western Europeans hated Bush. Obama is receiving the Nobel for not being Bush.

Eighty percent of success is showing up. Woody Allen

Random said...

First of all, I actually have a lot of sympathy for Obama over this. I don't believe for a moment he either sought or welcomed this - watching his body language at the press conference it was clear that, although he said all the right words, he was clearly very uncomfortable about the whole thing. I suspect in private he was thinking "I really don't need this cr@p right now", and appreciated perfectly well the deluge of mockery and disbelief that was in the process of landing on his head even as he spoke. He was well and truly trapped however as the only thing he could have done that was more controversial than accepting the prize would be to turn it down, he will surely donate the prize money to some worthy charity rather than keep it in order to try to mitigate the downsides.

JP is almost certainly right on this one - he got it for not being George Bush (just like Al Gore did), he certainly didn't do anything else in the eleven days between being elected and nominations closing to deserve it.

jewish philosopher said...

I'm sure Hillary would have gotten it had she been elected. I bet she will get it in another year or two.

To Western European eyes, any American leader who is not Bush is the messiah.

Anonymous said...

we all thought it was a joke when we first heard it.. it still is !

shalom all
gp

limo hire said...

He got the honorable prize....