RSS Feed MenuFrom the age of 20, Barack Obama has collected acclaim, awards and prizes not for his accomplishments (which have always been rather scanty), but for his potential. You think with the guy nearing 50 and elected president of the United States that the prizes for “most promising young man” would cease. But no! The Nobel Committee has just awarded him one more.
Waiting in the wings: the Vatican. Why wait until the guy has performed his posthumous three miracles to confer sainthood upon him? Think of all the amazing miracles he might perform in the future!
sinz54 // Oct 9, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Oneon1isto: We’ll forget about this soon and get back to the economy, healthcare, borders and nuclear proliferation in about 24 hours.
I wish David Frum would start a discussion about the decline of the U.S. dollar. Plenty of news about that this week.
Oneon1isto // Oct 9, 2009 at 5:53 pm
True! And rumblings from OPEC about moving away from the dollar as currency of choice.
Lord that will kill our trade deficit–given that it ebbs and flows with oil. Can’t wait to get off that stuff.
balconesfault // Oct 9, 2009 at 5:59 pm
And the point I was trying to make was that FDR’s alliance with Stalin ushered in the forty year long Cold War, in which the entire world hovered on the brink of thermnonuclear war, and delivered half of Europe to 40 years of Communist slavery.
And yet BOTH decisions were defensible, given the context of the time.
It is an interesting comparison.
I think there are flaws – for example, I don’t believe that Americans would have died in combat had Reagan not cultivated Islamic radicals in Afghanistan, while there’s no question that tens of thousands more US troops would have died had we not supported Stalin in his war against Hitler.
And half of Europe wasn’t turned over to Stalin because of our alliance to defeat Hitler – but because the US wasn’t ready to go to war with Stalin over Europe while we were still facing a campaign against the Japanese. When lines were drawn at Yalta, Hitler was already toast.
So … in essence we replaced a Soviet nuclear threat plus their domination of the Eastern Bloc … with a Russian nuclear threat that no longer controls the Eastern Bloc. I think that’s a far cry from the US suffering huge numbers of casualties in Europe had there been no strong Russia to pull Hitler’s resources eastward.
ottovbvs // Oct 9, 2009 at 6:25 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3ByUuF-_DA&feature=related
ottovbvs // Oct 9, 2009 at 6:27 pm
balconesfault // Oct 9, 2009 at 5:59 pm
……80% of the Wehrmacht casualties were sustained in Russia………Alan Brooke’s strategy was correct…..let the Russians break the Wehrmacht before we launch a European invasion
wrs10 // Oct 9, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Lighten up folks – the Peace Prize this year has been a farce! Enter into the spirit of things! What is there not to laugh at?
Ashley71 // Oct 9, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Being a Republican in 2009: Up at arms when a sitting American President wins the Nobel Peace Prize and celebrating when America loses it’s bid to host the Olympics.
This is all that is wrong with our party. We will never have another majority as long as we behave like this.
SFTor1 // Oct 9, 2009 at 8:56 pm
No, it’s not a farce. I agree that the prize is premature based on Obama’s accomplishments. What is not premature is the acknowledgment of the new Administration repositioning the United States as a nation that cooperates and seeks peace. That’s a major development, and speaks volumes about where the country’s foreign policy had drifted over the last eight years of iron-jawed belligerence.
Obama inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is not much he can do about that except seek to bring each to some kind of satisfactory close. He is working on that.
D // Oct 10, 2009 at 1:19 am
Mr. Frum,
So you agree that the award is well deserved…. Wouldn’t you say that the evidence suggests that Mr. Obama has lived up to all the accolades he has been receiving for potential “since he was 20″ (i dont know what you are talking about, because he went to Harvard on loans, and before that he was making about 20,000 a year in Chicago, before which he was at Columbia on more loans).
These are the facts. It is brilliant use of the award to invest it in the most promising politician who happens to lead the most powerful (by far and away) nation state in the world. Mr. Obama has been quite forthright in his first 9 months in the Presidency, despite having inherited a mountain of problems and a gargantuan deficit from your former boss (the speech you wrote for him have contributed to this deficit). This again, is a fact, albeit a tedious one.
Mr. Obama has admitted that the US overthrow a free and fair government in Iran in 1953 (an enormously gutsy thing to do for a new US President), he has vowed to close Guantanamo, he pretty much admitted at the UN that the US had committed torture. These again, are facts – which your boss ignored.
I hope you realize that this award is as much for the promise of Mr. Obama as it is a sight of relief that the threat of such unbelievable power (as the US has – it is more powerful than many of the next most powerful nations on earth combined, and spends more on defense that these countries as well), – being placed in the hands on someone has reckless as Mr. Bush, who is backed by people as ideologically crazy as right-wing republican neoliberals, has now passed.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is not an American for a moment, and think imagine yourself faced with the fact that a nation which spends 30 times more than you on defense, has more nuclear warheads than everyone else combined, and believes it has the right to interfere militarily anywhere it pleases as long as it can get a pliant legislature to sign off on it. That is what the world faced. But you can’t do this, because it would require empathy on your part to even imagine it.
Oh, and did i mention that the election of an african-american to the highest job in a western nation is the single most significant political shift in the western world in about 400 years? You do not realize the enormity of it – but it is the single greatest shift away from the white, european domination of the world. Of course, history is more complicated that this, but think about it. Think about the fact that the first black president of the US gets 4 times more death threats than the man who was elected despite being defeated in the popular vote the first time, and who proceeded to lead America into two wars, which had they been waged by any other nation against an american ally, America would have been quick to call ‘war crimes’. That will tell you how huge the election was.
The Nobel Peace Prize just went activist Mr. Frum. It has shown a keenness for history as well as the present, which the 24×7 media circus can’t even begin to fathom.
EscapeVelocity // Oct 10, 2009 at 2:30 am
Who doesnt want to believe in Leftwing Kum ba Ya fairytales?
Someone has to be the grownups.
sinz54 // Oct 10, 2009 at 9:20 am
D:
Thank you so much for admitting that the REAL reasons they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama were:
1. He’s not white.
2. He’s not Bush.
3. He doesn’t want America to be a superpower.
And as far as your claptrap about “the single greatest shift away from the white, european domination of the world”, remember one thing:
Here in the United States, we’re all supposed to be Americans, no matter what the color of our skin is. I hope for YOUR sake that Obama does NOT see himself as ending “white domination of America.” Because that is unconstitutional and could easily get him impeached and removed from office on that basis.
And as for YOU: Go live in Zimbabwe, where white folks are constantly being persecuted, harassed and reviled. It sounds like where you belong.
sinz54 // Oct 10, 2009 at 9:28 am
balconesfault: I don’t believe that Americans would have died in combat had Reagan not cultivated Islamic radicals in Afghanistan
But the Cold War might have gone on longer, maybe indefinitely. And the tyrannies of Eastern Europe, and of the Russian peoples themselves, would have continued.
Unlike you liberals, I consider the loss of freedom by totalitarian regimes to be just as significant as casualties. You liberals just don’t believe in “Give me liberty or give me death.” You don’t believe in shedding blood, even for causes YOU believe in yourselves.
Reagan did everything in his power to break the Soviet grip on Eurasia. This included covert aid to the Afghan rebels, covert aid to the Solidarity regime in Poland, allowing the Soviets to steal computer technologies in which our CIA had carefully implanted bugs to make them useless in actual operation, and numerous other actions. Those captive nations of Eastern Europe are free democracies now, without the fear of secret police or GULAGs.
But you don’t care that the peoples of Eastern Europe are free–because you don’t consider that freedom worth the blood shed in Afghanistan.
That’s why liberals like you–and Obama–are of a very different stripe than liberals like FDR or Truman. You don’t believe that freedom is worth shedding lots of blood for.
sinz54 // Oct 10, 2009 at 9:30 am
spartacusisnotdead: Sinz, do you have any evidence that Obama’s race was a factor in his Nobel award?
Go read the post from the poster named “D”. He’s on YOUR side, and he’s defending the Nobel award to Obama as a sign that “the election of an african-american to the highest job in a western nation is …. the single greatest shift away from the white, european domination of the world.”
So go argue with HIM.
sinz54 // Oct 10, 2009 at 9:36 am
spartacusisnotdead: A larger point to be made here is that many conservative posters on this site seem unwilling or incapable of evaluating the individual merits of a circumstance or a policy.
You want individual merits? Fine.
In a nutshell, Obama did not deserve this award on the individual merits. It was blatantly political–yet another slap at Bush, who has now been out of office for ten months. And a warning to Obama to continue to pursue a peacenik course: Let Iran have the atomic bomb, etc.
Obama did NOT win the Presidency through some coup d’etat or revolutionary armed struggle. The American people CHOSE him to bring change.
But the Nobel Committee didn’t mention that fact at all. Americans got no credit for choosing the first African-American president, or for choosing a major shift in policy. Instead, their effusive explanation was all about Obama, as if Europeans were saying “Thank heavens those stupid Americans voted for the right guy once, like a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
Screw them all.
Every day that American power eclipses European power sticks in the Europeans’ craw–and brings a smile to my face.
sinz54 // Oct 10, 2009 at 10:29 am
spartacusisnotdead:
This comment is from Andra Gillespie, an African-American professor of political science at Emory University:
The other thing that really troubles me about this is how I suspect that this award is inextricably tied to Obama’s story of breaking barriers in American politics. Far be it from me to make everything a story about race, but I fear that not only are we turning Obama into the Messiah, we are turning him into the Black Messiah. Just as there’s the narrative of the negative, pathological black, there’s also the story of the black superhero who makes everything right against all obstacles. Both narratives are insidious because they turn their victims into caricatures that don’t reflect reality.
sinz54 // Oct 10, 2009 at 10:50 am
spartacusisnotdead:
This is from the Los Angeles Times editorial of today:
“Obama remains a powerful voice of hope and change for many Europeans, not only because of his eloquence and his reassertion of America’s role as a leader of international diplomacy, but also because he physically embodies change as progress. In this country, most people have taken their cue from a president determined to govern as chief executive of a post-racial society.”
I’ll give you one guess what they meant by “physically embodies.”
It’s YOUR FELLOW LIBERALS who are cheering the idea that the Nobel Prize went to the first African-American president, as if having dark skin qualifies for a Nobel Prize. So don’t blame me for it.
It’s YOU LIBERALS who are saying it’s great that Obama won because:
1. He’s not white.
2. He’s not Bush.
3. He wants to manage the decline of America into being just one nation among many.
EscapeVelocity // Oct 10, 2009 at 1:05 pm
D is the physical embodiment of the Western Left.
SpartacusIsNotDead // Oct 11, 2009 at 1:19 am
Sinz,
So let me make sure I understand you correctly. You allege that Obama won the Nobel, in part, because he is not white. I then ask you if you have any evidence that his race was a factor in winning, and the evidence you offer is: (1) a comment posted 24 hours after yours by someone calling himself “D,” which, when read carefully, does not support your allegation, (2) a Los Angeles Times editorial, which, when read carefully, does not support your allegation, and (3) an opinion by some black poli sci professor at Emory.
I’m sorry, but the reactions of a poli sci professor, the L.A. Times editorial page and some poster using the pseudonym “D” do not constitute evidence of racial bias on the part of the Nobel prize committee.
Do you think if I find three people who agree with Kanye West’s allegation after Hurricaine Katrina that George Bush doesn’t like black people that that would somehow be evidence of racial animosity on the part of George Bush?
You should probably take a nap and try to collect your thoughts after you’ve had some rest.
SpartacusIsNotDead // Oct 11, 2009 at 1:30 am
Sinz wrote: “It’s YOUR FELLOW LIBERALS who are cheering the idea that the Nobel Prize went to the first African-American president”
Actually, I think pretty much everyone, except for conservatives and the Taliban, are cheering the fact that an American president won the Nobel Prize even though we don’t think his current accomplishments justify it, which is Obama’s opinion as well. We think the award is, as Obama said, an affirmation of American leadership and a call to action to pursue peace.