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Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Nobel Prize for Slick Marketing

The Commander in Chief of the mightiest military the earth has ever known wins the Nobel Peace Prize while fighting two wars. Sounds like something from the Onion, right?

When the prize was announced, a lot of people who haven't drunk the 'change' flavored Kool-Aid asked, What, specifically, has he actually done to deserve this? What results support it?

And my liberal friends, most of them, gave responses ranging from 'you'd have to be a racist not to get it' to 'you just don't want change, even if it's change for the better.'

Now the same people who defended the prize now want him to give it back because he's escalating the war in Afghanistan. Which might, depending on how things shake out, actually justify a Nobel Peace Prize. For instance, if it actually meant that a country that has known nothing but three decades of warfare, corruption, an intolerant theocracy and large occupying armies, became a place a human would actually want to live. But that unlikely day is far in the future, probably further than the end of the world.

Giving a Nobel to a politician on the basis of some shit he said to get elected is like giving me the Abel Prize because I helped my daughter with her math homework last night and, who knows, I might do some really killer work in higher mathematics someday.

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