On Obama's Nobel Prize, and frothing idiots on the opinion page.

I see articles from the Left on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, and more often than not they're either making heroic efforts to understand it, or just flat out saying “Seriously, even we think WTF!”

Then I see vitriolic drivel from wannabe Neo-Cons who never got the memo, saying “Peace prize becomes a travesty”.

Well, Paul Sheehan, you're not just wrong, you're stupid.

For a start, the Nobel Peace Prize became a travesty in 1973, with the event which made Tom Lehrer quit, saying that satire was now obsolete.

And second, Sheehan is sheeting blame at exactly the wrong people.

Since then, the US President has knowingly propped up a corrupt and violent regime in Afghanistan led by a lying fraud. He has achieved nothing to prevent the continued building of Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank.

... yeah. As opposed, of course, to the man responsible for putting that corrupt and violent regime in power in the first place. As opposed to all the help Bush gave to the beleaguered Palestinian people, and all the punishment he handed out to Israel... Oh, wait, he did none of either.

And I don't remember Sheehan saying anything about helping the Palestinians last year. I don't remember him castigating anyone for allowing Karzai to remain in ‘control’ of Afghanistan Khabul last year. Suddenly, now that a Democrat is in (theoretic) control, it's all his fault. Has Sheehan become a lefty, now? Because all the things he's bitching and moaning about Obama not having done yet are all the things we've been yelling about for a few years now.

And, yes, we are pissed off that Obama hasn't gotten around to any of that yet. But given the way he's been treated over his attempt to institute a Heath System for Americans which isn't an insane Dickensian nightmare, I'm not surprised that his timetable has been somewhat disrupted.

But still. While there have been two other sitting US Presidents who have received the Nobel Peace Prize while in office (Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919), they were both in their second term. It really does look like Obama was given an award for not being Bush.

But still, the wingnuts are not screeching in outrage because it makes no sense, they're screeching because it's Obama. How dare he be popular! How dare people think that the Fox-‘News’-organised Teabagger astroturf isn't the real voice of America!

Why is it that US governments continue to support corrupt, violent and dysfunctional regimes?

asks demands Sheehan in high dudgeon. And that's an excellent question. Another would be: Why did the US Government put this corrupt violent and dysfunctional regime in power in the first place? It was no secret that the Taleban were popular in Afghanistan because they were an improvement over the thieves, murderers, druglords and warlords who became the Northern Alliance; of whom Karzai was the leader. So if Obama is having difficulty with Karzai, it's Bush who gave him that mess to clean up, and Obama at least knows that you can't bomb someone into democracy.

But, of course, if you're going to put forward a ridiculous smear, you may as well try and smear it over an entire swathe of the population:

The person most responsible for the Nobel committee's sycophancy is the chairman of the five-member committee, Thorbjoern Jagland, 58, a former prime minister of Norway with a long history of left-wing politics.

Of course, mentioning that the five members of the committee are Thorbjørn Jagland (Left), Kaci Kullmann Five (Right), Sissel Rønbeck (Left), Inger-Marie Ytterhorn (Right), and Ågot Valle (Left), and that the vote was unanimous. But that inconvenient fact doesn't fit with his happy little diatribe, so he conveniently forgot to mention it. The egregious Mr Bolt mentions it once, but he thinks he got away with it, by mischaracterising the center-right Høyre as not really right-wing at all, and the isolationist, free-market, populist Fremskrittspartiet as ‘center-right’. And forgot to mention the unanimous bit.



Look, you on the Right — and you know who you are — remember when Bush was in power and you kept laughing at the angry commentary about us on the Left, and how hysterical and reactionary and emotional and wrong we were being?
Well, first: we were right; and second: shut the fuck up. Thank you.