Saving The World In Two Weeks
That’s the screenshot from the front page of the UK Times OnlineBarack Obama today sensationally won the Nobel Peace Prize after just nine months in office for returning America to a multilateralist foreign policy after eight years of going it alone under George W Bush.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honouring the 48-year-old US President for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.
The five jurors, elected by the Norwegian parliament, also said in their citation that they had attached “special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons”.
The choice of Mr Obama came as a complete surprise – the frontrunners for the last Nobel prize of the year included the Chinese dissident Hu Jia and the Colombian senator Piedad Cordoba. It also prompted widespread controversy.
Are you ready for the punchline?
Mr Obama was elected America’s first (half-)black president last December and assumed office on January 20 – which means that he had been in office less than two weeks by the time nominations closed on February 1.
So, in those first two weeks he gave a bunch of interviews to magazines, gave some speeches, couldn’t figure out the type of dog to get, made a few more appearances on TV entertainment shows, and signed legislation to close Guantanamo Bay detention facility, which the Democrat Congress refuses to supply the money needed to close it, and Obama still has no plan, 8 months later, to actually close.
The decision was welcomed by other Nobel peace laureates, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Yunnus and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the UN’s nuclear watchdog and won the prize in 2005, said: “I cannot think of anyone today more deserving of this honour. In less than a year in office, he has transformed the way we look at ourselves and the world we live in and rekindled hope for a world at peace with itself.”
How about the Iranian dissidents? How about, specifically, Mohammad-Reza Ali Zamani, who is scheduled to be hanged for participating in the Iranian protests?
If he has rekindled hope, then why is Iran still working to achieve nuclear weapons? Why is Darfur still a messWhy is North Korea still rattling their rusty sabre? If the world is so full of hopenchange, why did the Olympic Committee slap Obama in the face with a cold, dead fish?
I’d mention the opinion piece you see in the screenshot, but, really, the Nobel Peace prize is already a joke, having become one the minute Yassar Arafat was anointed as a recipient. And, while Carter may be a complete anti-Semite and a virulent America hater, at least he worked hard to create peace between Israel and Egypt, which still kinda holds up today. Obama? Maybe one day he will deserve the prize. Right now:
“It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration.”
In other words “f**k Bush”.
A World “without” nuclear weapons is a World that will be nuked by a rogue state that still has nuclear weapons under wraps.
>:o
I see William Hague approves of the award. >:o
I nominated Miss Lithuania 😉 to the Nobel Jury for listing Creating World Peace among her ambitions but they simply ignored me =-O .
I think in a fit of grumpiness this time last year I looked at the nomination rules to see how you could properly put someone forward. The easiest way was to know a professor of sociology if I recall. Must look it up again – we could have some fun with that.
Cum catapult proscript erat, tum soli poscript catapultas habebunt as they say in Latin….
If you outlaw catapults, only outlaws will have catapults.