Nothing Noble about this Nobel- Another "Prize" Obama (Non)Performance

Many pundits have made the point that President Obama had only been in office for 12 days when the February 1 deadline for nominations to be submitted for this year's Nobel prize occurred. The common theme, among liberals as much as among conservatives, is that there is no way the President should have received the Nobel for that period, or ever for the months since, all the moreso as he had accomplished nothing of any real substance. Agreed!

However, some have missed two (possibly) salient points. The first is that the committee may have considered Obama the man (as opposed to, the President) in awarding him the Prize. However, the fact is that he didn't accomplish anything of Nobel stature as 'the man', either! And he had a whole lot longer to work on it.

The other point is that the committee may have bent the rules an accepted the nomination after the deadline. There is circumstantial evidence this may have been the case. The nomination may have come MUCH later than the deadline. Or Obama is just pretending he didn't know about it. Either case is bad, but the latter is worse as evidence of Obama's guile and deceitfulness. I leave it to the readers to decide what they believe is the case, and how bad it is.

An interesting side note is that the Constitution prohibits a sitting president from accepting gifts from foreign sources. One way Obama could avoid this issue ( the Prize comes with a $1MM award), is to donate it. Perhaps---just a thought here---to his relatives who are living in poverty in Kenya.?Those same relatives who have received no help from the President.

What a a character ( or lack thereof)!

It's clear that Obama is being anointed with this award---which ironically now because of it's award to him is severely diminished in it's moral value (just read the Newsweek article!)---because he exists, nothing more! It's interesting to ponder the opposite of Bush Derangement Syndrome---Obamaphilia! A different kind of derangement syndrome.

And a more dangerous and sinister one at that.

Mark Steyn said it best (Richard Cohen did a dead on sarcastic tourdeforce in the WaPo, too), so we close with his words.

Who can imagine what is next in Dr. Obama's White House of Horrors?

Here's Steyn, in top form, as always!:

Mark Steyn: Nobel tops 'SNL' for Obama joke

Gosh, it's been so long ago ... what "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy" did Obama make in the first 12 days?

Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics Web site the other day was: "Is Obama Becoming A Joke?" With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize. Up next: His stunning victory in this year's Miss World contest. Dec. 12, Johannesburg. You read it here first.

For what, exactly, did he win the Nobel? As the president himself put it:
"When you look at my record, it's very clear what I have done so far. And that is nothing. Almost one year and nothing to show for it. You don't believe me? You think I'm making it up? Take a look at this checklist."
And up popped his record of accomplishment, reassuringly blank.

Oh, no, wait. That wasn't the real President Barack Obama. That was a comedian playing President Obama on "Saturday Night Live." And, for impressionable types who find it hard to tell the difference, CNN – in a broadcast first that should surely have its own category at the Emmys – performed an in-depth "reality check" of the SNL sketch. That's right: They fact-checked the jokes. Seriously. "How much truth is behind all the laughs? Stand by for our reality check," promised Wolf Blitzer, introducing his in-depth report with all the plonking earnestness so cherished by those hapless Americans stuck at Gate 73 for four hours with nothing to watch but the CNN airport channel. Given the network's ever more exhaustive absence of viewers among the non-flight-delayed demographic, perhaps Wolf could make it a regular series:

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
That was no lady, that was my wife.

"In fact, our sources confirm, his wife is, biologically speaking, a lady. Joining us now is our Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, we all like a joke, but how much truth is behind the laughs?"

Fortunately, the Nobel Committee understands that President Obama's accomplishments are no laughing matter. So they gave him the Peace Prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." I assumed this was a reference to his rip-roaring success in winning the Olympic Games for Rio, but as it turns out the deadline for Nobel nominations was way back on Feb. 1.

Obama took office on Jan. 20. Gosh, it's so long ago now. What "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy" did he make in those first 12 days? Bowing to the Saudi king? Giving the British prime minister the Walmart discount box of "Twenty Classic Movies You've Seen A Thousand Times"? "Er, Barack, I've already seen these." "That's OK. They won't work in your DVD player anyway."

For these and other "extraordinary efforts" in "cooperation between peoples", President Obama is now the fastest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history. Alas, the extraordinary efforts of those first 12 days are already ancient history. Reflecting the new harmony of U.S.-world relations since the administration hit the "reset" button, The Times of London declared the award "preposterous," and Svenska Freds (the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society) called it "shameful." There's something almost quaintly vieux chapeau about the Nobel decision, as if the hopeychangey bumper stickers were shipped surface mail to Oslo and only arrived last week. Everywhere else, they're peeling off: The venerable lefties at Britain's New Statesman currently have a cover story on "Barack W. Bush".

Happily, there are still a few Americans willing to stand by Mister Saturday Night. "I am shocked at the mean-spirited comments," wrote Judi Romaine to The Times in protest at all the naysaying. "I'm afraid I've registered into a very conversative [sic], fear-based world here but I'd like to suggest the incredible notion we all create our worlds in our conversations. What are you building by maligning rather than creating discourses for workability? Bravo to Obama and others working for people, however it appears to cynics."

If that's the language you have to speak when you're "working for people," I'd rather work for a cranky mongoose. Yet to persons who can use phrases like "creating discourses for workability" with a straight face, Obama remains an heroic figure. Like Judi Romaine, he works hard to "create our worlds in our conversations." Why, only the other day, very conversationally, the administration floated the trial balloon that it could live with the Taliban returning to government in Afghanistan. A lot of Afghans won't be living with it, but that's their lookout.

This is – how to put this delicately? – something of a recalibration of Obama's previous position. From about a year after the fall of Baghdad, Democrats adopted the line that Bush's war in Iraq was an unnecessary distraction from the real war, the good war, the one in Afghanistan that everyone – Dems, Europeans, all the nice people – were right behind, 100 percent. No one butched up for the Khyber Pass more enthusiastically than Barack Obama: "As President, I will make the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban the top priority." (July 15, 2008)

But that was then, and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, "War kills off great reform movements." As the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues. Obama's priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

Gosh, given their many assertions that Afghanistan is "a war we have to win" (Obama to the VFW, August 2008), you might almost think, pace Judi Romaine, that it's the president and water-bearers like Gunga Dionne who are the "cynics." In a recent speech to the Manhattan Institute, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that, in diminishing American power abroad to advance statism at home, Obama and the American people will be choosing decline. There are legitimate questions about our war aims in Afghanistan, and about the strategy necessary to achieve them. But, eight years after being toppled, the Taliban will see their return to power as a great victory over the Great Satan, and so will the angry young men from Toronto to Yorkshire to Chechnya to Indonesia who graduated from Afghanistan's Camp Jihad during the 1990s.

And so will the rest of the world: They will understand that the modern era's ordnungsmacht (the "order maker") has chosen decline.

Barack Obama will have history's most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy – for America and the world.
©MARK STEYN