Friday, October 9, 2009

On President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

To widespread surprise and even shock, from both the Left and the Right, President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. According to Yahoo News:

"The announcement drew gasps of surprise and cries of too much, too soon. Yet President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday because the judges found his promise of disarmament and diplomacy too good to ignore."

A promise of disarmament and diplomacy? You know that something is amiss when the Prize is awarded for absolutely no reason whatsoever! The entire Yahoo article is full of statements by prominent world leaders fumbling for a way to say essentially the same thing … nothing. All they accomplished was to fall all over themselves to show just how mesmerized they still are with our president.

Obama certainly joins some prestigious company – Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, and Al Gore, for example. Of course, they at least can boast of some concrete “accomplishments”, if you want to call them that. But still, Obama fits right in with that crowd ideologically.

Yet, there is something that doesn’t make sense. Even for a so corrupt an institution as the Peace Prize sector of the Nobel establishment, this is really over the top. There is not even a pretense of any claim to any kind of actual justification, however shallow, to support this embarrassing decision. The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s gibberish about “an early vote of confidence intended to build global support for the policies of his young administration” and “the change in global mood wrought by Obama's calls for peace and cooperation” and “pledges to reduce the world stock of nuclear arms, ease U.S. conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthen its role in combating climate change” just doesn’t quite cut it, even for this sorry crowd.

What, then, could be the reason for this rush job? There is a critical anniversary coming up on November 9th of this year. This is the clue that makes it all logical.

Obama is an appeaser, a proven path to increased conflict. So was
Carter, who did nothing about Iran’s act of war against us (the 1979 hostage crisis). We’re still paying the price for that. Arafat was a murdering terrorist.
Gore is a global warming statist and profiteer. The Peace Prize is a
Left wing sham.

Though a mixed bag politically and philosophically, Ronald Reagan got
at least one big thing right. He recognized that the Soviet Communist
Empire was an economic and ideological house of cards propped up by
the West. Only a very small handful of others believed that, including
Ayn Rand, Richard Pipes, and Margaret Thatcher. Against almost universal opposition,
Reagan acted. He removed the moral sanction of our détente and
“peaceful coexistence” strategies by declaring the Soviets an Evil
Empire
. Opposition dissidents behind the Iron Curtain were electrified
into action.

Then, as Margaret Thatcher recounted in her Reagan funeral eulogy;

“So the President resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet
weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to
collapse beneath the combined weight of these pressures and its own
failures.”


With continued Western economic support and moral sanction, the Evil
Empire could have survived for another generation or more, possibly
with cataclysmic consequences. Instead, the ever-present threat of
nuclear war was removed, and a billion people were freed … virtually
without firing a shot.

It is my belief that the premature awarding of the Prize to Obama is an attempt to blunt the coming renewed recognition of Reagan’s indisputable
achievement with the arrival next month of the 20th anniversary of the
crumbling of the Berlin Wall
– the symbol of the collapse of totalitarian communism.
The Left has never forgiven Reagan for that. When the accolades begin, the Left will attempt to diminish Reagan’s stature with the reminder that “Yes, that was good. But our guy won the Nobel Piece Prize!”

I believe that this award at this time is an attempt to prop up Obama's stature in the face of the coming remembrances of President Ronald Reagan.

But whatever the reason, unless and until it is awarded (posthumously) to
Ronald Reagan (jointly, perhaps, with Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II), the Nobel Peace Prize will remain a sham and a moral abomination.

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