May the farce be with you, Mr. President

This should provide the Right’s commentariat with fodder for vitriol and humor for quite some time. Obama as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize? Does the Left have absolutely no sense of proportion? Is there nothing about their messiah that does not cause them to cringe? The Norwegian committee that makes this choice had rather lost its credibility in the past, when it chose Jimmy Carter (who has never met a leftist thug he doesn’t like) in 2002 and Al Gore (whose vocal flatulence has caused more global warming even than his mansion and his SUVs) in 2007. Both of those awards were rightly seen as political jabs at George W. Bush. But now, this committee of primarily socialist lickspittles has completely turned the award into a politicized farce. One has to remember that, to qualify for the award, Obama had to be nominated by February 1, less than two weeks after the inauguration.

The article points out that the Left objected to the 1973 Peace Prize being given to Henry Kissinger. I sympathize with the Left’s objection to that award. But the article fails to point out that the Left did not object to the prize being given to Le Duc Tho, the minister of the expansionist North Vietnamese Communist regime. Mr. Le, however, had the decency to decline the award and thereby saved the Left further need to publicize their double standard. Notice that, with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt, every American who has received the reward has done things to embarrass the U.S. or otherwise to participate in its humiliation abroad. Obama’s foreign policy and his World Apology Tour 2009 are cases on point. This theater of the absurd makes one consider favorably, however briefly, even the Ron Paul “Fortress America” isolationism to let the rest of the world devour each other.

Obama has accomplished nothing remotely worthy of any award. The committee claims it is trying affirmatively to encourage behavior. This is, then, an affirmative action award, given under the usual criteria that characterize such policies. The result of this will simply be further to convince Obama that his mere presence will achieve his goals. That is a dangerous view for Americans, as it will further make dissent seen as, at best, disrespectful to The One and, at worst, un-patriotic and intolerable. But it also carries political risk for Obama, who will come to be seen more and more for what he is, a transnationalist and not an “American” President. It builds on the developing image of Obama as narcissistic, beholden to foreigners, and weak.

On a related matter, George W. Bush did far more to promote peace and freedom than Obama has, especially for Muslims. So it is not surprising that Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs gives an interview on radical Muslim TV in Britain, extolling the virtues of Shari’a law in providing “gender justice” for women. Other than her reasonable and apt observation that promiscuity and the breakdown of traditional values is what Muslims like least about the West, her remarks and her silence to the comments of others (such as repeated attacks on secular “man-made law” and the West’s “lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism”) are indefensible.