It’s official. The Nobel Peace Prize is now utterly meaningless. It began to lose its luster when it was awarded to Mikhail Gorbachev after Reagan kicked his butt in the Cold War. That’s not to say that some deserving winners haven’t been awarded the prize between now and then, but when they find a chance to make a radical, liberal political statement, they do.
The United Nations and Secretary General Kofi Annan won in 2001 for their work for “a better organized world,” read: One World Government. The Great Appeaser, the Neville Chamberlain of our time, Jimmy Carter, won in 2002. Oh, and who can forget Al Gore winning in 2007 for a subject that had nothing whatsoever to do with peace.
Now there’s Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Not that he’s actually done any of that. All that counts is he tried. Here’s a guy who is fighting two wars simultaneously and he gets a peace prize. Not that there’s anything wrong with fighting these wars. I believe they’re just and necessary, but should it not have been George W. Bush who got the nod for liberating Iraq and bringing freedom and peace to such an oppressed people? That will never happen because conservatives never get the prize.
As far as Obama getting the prize, it was a bribe, plain and simple. It was not a monetary bribe because the money will, ostensibly, go to charity. It was a prestige bribe. At a time when Obama is considering sending 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to actually win the war there, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee saw an opportunity to give the Americans a black eye. If the committee can shame Obama into deciding against the troops, then things will quickly begin to deteriorate in Afghanistan and the Americans will be sent packing with their tails between their legs. To a bunch of elitist, socialist, eggheads in Norway, nothing could be finer.
Oh, and they are, undoubtedly, far left-wing socialists. Nobel Peace Prize Committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland is a radical, socialist, Norwegian politician who is clearly anti-American. He just spent 10 years as vice president of Socialist International. The member organization here is the Democratic Socialists of America, which advocates the dismantling of our capitalist system. One must wonder, if the socialists across the world are heaping praise on our president, then what have we done to our country by electing him?
But let’s look at some of the people who didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize because the socialists in Norway were falling all over Barack Obama. Wei Jingsheng is now a U.S. resident who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons simply for urging reforms in China. Of course, that can’t compare to eight months of wishing for world peace.
Someone else who was dissed by the committee so Obama could receive his undeserved honor was Dr. Simar Samar. She’s an Afghan woman who has risked her very life for a greater part of the last 10 years while treating women and girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is not the kind of work, of course, that comes close to wishing for world peace for an entire eight months.
Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation admits that he agrees with Obama’s foreign policy. However, he, too, thought the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to someone who had done little or nothing to earn it was at least premature.
“What the Nobel Committee has managed to change, and I am sorry to say it,” Schieffer said, “is the way we look on the prize.”
Phil Valentine is an author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host with Westwood One. For more of his commentary and articles, visit philvalentine.com.
