The Nobel sham

(...or "The deification of Barack Obama")

The cluster of Nobel Peace Prize winners from throughout most of the 1900's includes some heady company. Teddy Roosevelt and Elihu Root. George C. Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr. Mother Teresa and Lech Walesa.

Things started getting goofy with that vaunted prize in the latter edges of the twentieth century.

• Yasser Arafat. PLO terrorist extraordinaire.


• Jimmy Carter. No, not for his work between Israel and Egypt in the 1970's, but he won it in 2002. For???


• Mohamed ElBaradei. That's the guy I wrote about recently from the Atomic International Energy Agency who sees Israel as the greatest "nuclear threat" in the Middle East.


• Al Gore. For climate change??? Did he make the climate change? Will he stop the climate from changing? That's like someone winning the prize for the sunrise.

The scales of the absurd have not only tipped, they've completely toppled with the selection of Barack Obama, President of the United States, as the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. I count two former presidents receiving this accolade for something they did while president. President Obama is the first president to win the award for something he might do.

You see, submissions for Nobel take place the February prior to the award being given. That means that President Obama held the helm of our nation for, 0h, one month when he was nominated. What had he done? Bailout I. I don't recollect if he'd genuflected to the Saudi king yet but his great international sucking-up and American apology tour was just getting under way.

Did he stabilize the Balkans? Did he calm the waters between Pakistan and India? Did he unite the factions of Afghanistan or Iraq? Did he neuter the hatred of fundamental Muslims toward Christians and Jews (i.e. the West)? Did he solve the world's economic crisis? Did he make Republicans and Democrats the best of friends? Did he make peace between Brett Favre and Green Bay?

I can't think of anything Barack Obama did worthy of a Nobel Prize. Yet.

Despite my disagreement with almost everything he's implemented as president to date, the proof is in the pudding. Well, he just put the pudding in the fridge to set up. No, worse. He just got the ingredients out onto the counter. He may yet prove a worthy recipient of that for which the Nobel Peace Prize is intended, but bestowing it on a president after one month's work is like giving Tim Tebow the NFL MVP trophy for 2010...right now.

This smacks of Hollywood's self-congratulatory lovefest we call the Academy Awards. I love you. You love me. How about we give each other a little naked trophy?

What is going on? He wins the election of the world's strongest nation economically, influentially, and militarily with paltry little experience (absentee senator? Community organizer?). He wins the Nobel Peace Prize for...for...can anyone help me with this one? An AP article yesterday quoted African bishops heaping praise upon the President as evidence of divine pleasure.

"If the election of a black as head of the United States of America was a divine sign and a sign from the Holy Spirit for the reconciliation of races and ethnic groups for peaceful relations ... this synod and the universal church would gain from not ignoring this primordial event of contemporary history which is far from being a banal game of political alliances," the archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo gushed.

I'd be really sick if I understood half of what the bishop said.

President Obama is a man, just a man, but a man who holds the reigns of our nation. What he does with them still remains to be seen. To date, he has done precious little to warrant laurels from his own country much less the international community.

Alfred Nobel must be spinning like a top in his grave.