Assignment

There have sure been a lot of people all rankled over the fact that President Obama was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. Usually the Nobel Prize is given to a person after they have done something rather remarkable in their given field. This year? for instance? three men each shared the noble prize in Physics for their achievements in the capture and transmission of light particles. The award wasn't given to them because of some future achievement; it was a reward for hard work. In contrast Obama hasn't even finished a single year of his presidency? his stratospheric demeanour of hope has been seemingly brought back down by the realities of two ongoing wars? a shaky economy? and a democratic congress that is more concerned with re-election in conservative states than in effecting a rash of progressively liberal legislation. (http://online.wsj.com)

I am at a total loss for words. Sometimes? an event occurs that is so sublimely ridiculous that it becomes a parody of itself. That's what we have here. The news could just as easily be a Saturday Night Live comedy skit or a Mad Magazine layout. If it had appeared in either one of those venues yesterday? it would have seemed a ripe subject for satire and humour. I daresay even many liberals would have laughed at the notion of Obama getting the Nobel for peace.

No sense ignoring the obvious; what has he done? Teddy Roosevelt got his peace prize for mediating between Japan and Russia and ending their bloody war. Woodrow Wilson got his for his efforts at peace after World War I. Jimmy Carter - whatever else you can say about him - engineered a singular? personal triumph with the Camp David accords which was the first peace agreement between Israel and another Arab state. (http://online.wsj.com) What's Obama done? What peace has he negotiated? What efforts of his have born fruit? I suppose an organization that thought Yassar Arafat worthy of the same prize can't be taken seriously anyway. But they are. And there are implications beyond the profound stupidity of awarding this prize to a neophyte who hasn't accomplished anything. This is foreigners meddling in our domestic politics.

They have now created Obama as an international demigod? which will only play to his cult like status here in the US. It will no doubt stop the slow slide of his approval and boost his chances of getting health care reform passed. What it will mean for 2012 is too far in the future to really guess but it couldn't hurt him in his re-election campaign could it? The committee could not have been ignorant of this and no doubt? the thought that they could boost Obama's domestic standing played a role in naming him. (http:/ /nobelprize.org)

So the question then is? why in the world does he deserve a Nobel Prize? The answer is? he doesn't. But then neither do the physicists? chemists? doctors? and authors that receive one. They did not receive the prize because ...