Bret Stephens writes a thought-provoking piece in the WSJ today explaining why Obama might be the perfect pick for the Nobel Peace Prize after all (see my previous post). The problem is that we’re thinking of the prize’s winner using our own criteria, while, in reality, the criteria used by the Nobel Committee is entirely different. So, it’s not that we’re just missing something about Obama and therefore surprised by this—it’s that we’re missing something about the Nobel Peace Prize.

So, what are we missing? Bret Stephens explains—with quite a few examples—how the prize is not given to people who actually contributed to world peace, but rather to people who “hoped” and “dreamed” about peace the most, so to speak, even if their hopes and dreams were not realistic. Based on that general track record, Obama fits in perfectly!

You can see the original article for even more examples, but here’s the gist of his piece:

…if you’re among those who think Mr. Obama’s Nobel was misjudged and premature, not to say absurd, then you really know nothing about the values and thinking that have informed a century of prize giving. Far from being an aberrant choice, President Obama was the ideal one, Scandinavianally speaking.

The peace Nobel is a much misunderstood prize. With the exception of a few really grotesque picks (Le Duc Tho, Rigoberta Menchú, Yasser Arafat), a few inspired ones (Carl von Ossietzky, Norman Borlaug, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi) and some worthy if obvious ones (Martin Luther King, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk), most of the prize winners draw from the obscure ranks of the sorts of people the late Oriana Fallaci liked to call “the Goodists.”

Who are the Goodists? They are the people who believe all conflict stems from avoidable misunderstanding. Who think that the world’s evils spring from technologies, systems, complexes (as in “military-industrial”) and everything else except from the hearts of men, where love abides. Who mistake wishes for possibilities. Who put a higher premium on their own moral intentions than on the efficacy of their actions. Who champion education as the solution, whatever the problem. Above all, the Goodists are the people who like to be seen to be good.

…Characteristically, the Nobel Committee awarded no Peace Prizes for most of the Second World War: not to Franklin Roosevelt for turning America into an arsenal for democracy; not to Winston Churchill for rallying Britain against the Nazi onslaught; not to Charles de Gaulle for keeping the flame of a free France alive; not to the U.S. Army Rangers for scaling the heights of Pointe du Hoc on a June morning in 1944; not to Douglas MacArthur for turning Japan into a country at peace with itself and its neighbors.

These were the soldiers and statesmen who did more than anyone else to assure the survival of freedom in the 20th century. Being Goodists, however, the Nobel Committee chose instead to lavish its honors on people like the wan New England pacifist Emily Greene Balch (in 1946), the tedious British disarmament obsessive Philip Noel-Baker (1959) and the Irish antinuclear campaigner and Lenin Prize Winner Seán MacBride (1974).

These names don’t exactly spring to mind as having made a lasting and genuine contribution to world peace. Nor, one suspects, will history lavish its highest honors on Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Wangari Maathai, Mohamed ElBaradei, Al Gore or Martti Ahtisaari, to name some of this decade’s winners. They are merely the Frank Kelloggs and Seán MacBrides of the future.

Which brings us, at last, to this year’s prize winner.

Typical of the laments about Mr. Obama’s Nobel is that he’s done nothing yet to deserve it. But what, really, did most of the other Goodists do before they won their prizes? Mr. Obama, at least, got himself elected president, the first man to do so on explicitly Goodist terms: hope, change, diplomacy, disarmament, internationalism. He is, so to speak, the son Alfred Nobel never had (minus the dynamite fortune), the best and most significant spokesman for everything the Peace Prize has stood for these 108 years.

So let there be no doubt that the Nobel Committee did well in choosing Mr. Obama. What this portends for the kind of peace and security that has been bequeathed to us by the exertions of such non-Nobelists as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan is another question.

In a recent post regarding Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I included some interesting reactions by various members of the global community.

Here’s one reaction that surfaced only recently:

Reuters reports that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, often quite buddy-buddy with The Great Apologizer, has said that

Obama had done nothing beyond wishful thinking to earn the Nobel Peace Prize.

Chavez, who has mixed praise for Obama personally with criticism of his government’s “imperialist” policies, said he thought it was a mistake when he read the U.S. leader had won.

“What has Obama done to deserve this prize? The jury put store on his hope for a nuclear arms-free world, forgetting his role in perpetuating his battalions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his decision to install new military bases in Colombia,” Chavez wrote in a column.

“For the first time, we are witnessing an award with the nominee having done nothing to deserve it: rewarding someone for a wish that is very far from becoming reality.”

Chavez said giving Obama the Nobel award was like giving a baseball pitcher a prize simply for saying he was going to win 50 games and strike out 500 batters.

I’ve been working in the technology industry all my life and I have yet to encounter a “technical glitch” with this amazing level of precision.

The Guardian, a newspaper not exactly known for ever having anything nice to say about Israel, published a listing of what it referred to as “every peace prize winner ever” since the award’s inception in 1909. The only problem is that it left out every single winner from Israel. The names of Menachem Begin, Yizhak Rabin and Shimon Peres all disappeared from the list.

Arutz Sheva reports that the Guardian—after seeing a significant backlash from readers—added the names back to the list and blamed it on “technical issues”, a completely unbelievable answer that abysmally fails the “smell test”. After all, has anyone ever seen a technical glitch with such uncanny precision? Has anyone ever seen a computer make such a particularly accurate and specific “mistake”?

Anyone believing that ridiculous story is a bigger idiot than the liars at the Guardian who concocted it in the first place.

Here are the pictures of the “glitch” in action (thanks to Tom Gross). Notice how the “glitch” forgot to remove the country (Israel) from the listing… and also notice how the “glitch” astoundingly had no problems with every other multiple-winner year (like the 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, etc.)… only those exact years where the multiple winners involved one or more from Israel, and only those winners who were from Israel:

I almost wish I can go back to bed and wake up this morning all over again in the hope that doing so might actually bring about a more normal day the second time around, because the day I woke up to this morning—the upside-down, Alice-in-Wonderland world that smiled back at me today like one big spooky Cheshire cat—is a very, very strange and bizarre world. I feel as though I went to sleep in Normal Universe and woke up in the Twilight Zone. And, quite frankly, I wonder if I’ll ever get back to Normal Universe again.

I’m sure that by now I don’t even have to explain myself. After all, it’s all over the news, and it’s not only me who’s completely taken by surprise. Hell, even the folks around me here in super-liberal NYC are somewhat confused by what happened! Here’s one perfect example of one Manhattanite’s reaction, as reported by Reuters:

“It would be wonderful if I could think why he won,” said Claire Sprague, 82, a retired English professor as she walked her dog in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “They wanted to give him an honor I guess, but I can’t think what for.”

You also have those who, while clearly dumbfounded, try to phrase it somewhat diplomatically, as though Obama might at least be on track to earning it, but hasn’t gotten there yet. For example, the Wall Street Journal described the following reactions:

“So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far,” former Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said Friday. “He is still at an early stage.”

and:

Even in Norway [home of the Nobel Committee], where Mr. Obama enjoys huge popularity, the decision raised eyebrows among some. “It is just too soon,” said Siv Jensen, leader of Norway’s main opposition party, the Progress Party. “It is wrong to give him the peace prize for his ambition. You should receive it for results.”

And, then you have those whose reactions are more straightforward and blunt:

Issam al-Khazraji, a day laborer in Baghdad, said of Obama: “He doesn’t deserve this prize. All these problems — Iraq, Afghanistan — have not been solved … man of ‘change’ hasn’t changed anything yet.”

Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party in Pakistan, called the award an embarrassing “joke.”

London Times’ Michael Binyon comments that

the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama’s decision to “strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”. Many people will point out that, while the President has indeed promised to “reset” relations with Russia and offer a fresh start to relations with the Muslim world, there is little so far to show for his fine words.

…There is a further irony in offering a peace prize to a president whose principal preoccupation at the moment is when and how to expand the war in Afghanistan.

Even the President’s own men thought it was a big joke, as ABC News reports:

Two key White House aides were both convinced they were being punked when they heard the news, reported ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “It’s not April 1, is it?” one said.

And, finally, here’s none other than Michael Moore, monolith (almost literally) of the left, telling Obama:

Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize — Now Please Earn it!

To put it simply: what has Obama done? Nothing! He has exactly zero accomplishments to date in the pursuit of global peace. He hasn’t laid out any grand plans for the world, other than his usual fuzzy, vague expressions of “hope”. In fact, he has gone out of his way to antagonize democracies, while bowing down to dictators and tyrants (literally, in some cases) and legitimizing them.

But—wait—here’s the kicker, which most people either don’t know, or haven’t realized yet:  The deadline for nominations for the prize was February 1—a mere two weeks after Mr. Obama was inaugurated.

Naturally, there is a lot of speculation as to whether or not the world has lost its mind in their worship of Obama. But, here’s the most sound and shrewd theory I’ve heard all day (from my politics-savvy uncle):

This prize was essentially a way for the international community to guarantee that the United States is going to stand down on Iran and not invade the country over their nuclear ambitions. After all, now that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize, there’s no way he would then go and invade another country!

So, this was essentially one big payoff to Obama, one big buyout of the President of the United States… and, like an idiot, he took the bait. Despite the wide-eyed stupor of a reaction across every spectrum around the globe, he didn’t stop to wonder what the motive was behind a prize rewarding no accomplishments; he didn’t cautiously decline the prize like he should have done, at least out of respect for previous winners and their accomplishments (hold the laughter, please); instead, like the predictably arrogant, big-headed buffoon that he is, he swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, all the while throwing out words like “humbled” and “honored”, when all that really happened was the U.S. President getting played, his ego as his Achilles’ heel.

What a sad, sad joke.

I guess when they say, “you never know what tomorrow brings”… they mean that it sometimes brings you a big jarring anvil upside the head.

The vile Archbishop Desmond Tutu had some choice words for Haaretz (and all Israelis and even Jews) recently.

Here are some notable quotes from this anti-Semite and Nobel Peace Prize winner (the two often go hand in hand) :

• “The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns.”
• “[the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust] as it should be… But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians.”
• “…my own positions are actually derived from the Torah. You know God created you in God’s image. And we have a God who is always biased in favor of the oppressed.”

How a disgustingly outspoken clown like this ever got where he got is just unbelievable.