Continuing his ascent toward globe-girdling Godhead, Barack Obama has now been given the Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize is already little more than a political and cultural absurdity, a rubber-stamp of leftist adulation — but this award, in which the Nobel Committee shows all the dignity and sober judgment of a bunch of teenage girls at a Jonas Brothers concert, is remarkable even by the usual tendentious standards. What, exactly, has Mr. Obama — whose nomination, by the way, was submitted when he had been in office for about two weeks — done? Aside from making fawning salaams and obeisances before Islam in Cairo, and apologizing to all at every opportunity for America’s central role as creator and sustainer of all the world’s ills, his only accomplishments to date have been the extraction of tentative support from Russia for nuclear sanctions against Iran, and a handful of vague and hopeful speeches about a better tomorrow.
There was a time when the Prize was, at least, given for achievements, not aspirations. But I suppose we shouldn’t be too hard on the Nobel Committee: to their credit, they refrained from awarding Mr. Obama top honors in all the other categories as well.
