“Lifetime award for debutante Obama.”
True. The man has only been a few months in office.
But the truth is even stranger: It seems the last date for filing nominations for the peace prize was February 1. This means Obama got the prize for the work he did in his first 12 days of office! (Thanks to Karen De Coster on LRC.)
Who nominated him?
Whom did he beat to win the award?
Again, thanks to an LRC provided link, we have the answers to the latter question. Obama beat:
Sima Samar, women’s rights activist in Afghanistan: “With dogged persistence and at great personal risk, she kept her schools and clinics open in Afghanistan even during the most repressive days of the Taliban regime, whose laws prohibited the education of girls past the age of eight. When the Taliban fell, Samar returned to Kabul and accepted the post of Minister for Women’s Affairs.”
Ingrid Betancourt: French-Colombian ex-hostage held for six years.
Dr. Denis Mukwege: Doctor, founder and head of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. He has dedicated his life to helping Congolese women and girls who are victims of gang rape and brutal sexual violence.
Handicap International and Cluster Munition Coalition: “These organizations are recognized for their consistently serious efforts to clean up cluster bombs, also known as land mines. Innocent civilians are regularly killed worldwide because the unseen bombs explode when stepped upon.”
Hu Jia, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, who was sentenced last year to a three-and-a-half-year prison term for ‘inciting subversion of state power.’
Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China’s communist system. He now lives in the United States.
Of course, the peace prize has gone to many American warmongers before, from Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919) to Henry Kissinger (1973). One wag calls this prize “The Arms Dealers’ Cup.”
Pretty ugly, huh?
And Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. His biggest customers were armies.
Personally, I don’t follow the peace prize much, though the prize for Economics has become a disgrace. Last year it went to Paul Krugman in a blatant political move to shore up the Fed and its “stimulus.” Of course, this didn’t work.
But Obama is a very keen stimulus providing president. So perhaps the best idea is that expressed by Stephen Kinsella – give Obama the Nobel prize in Economics too. This way, we kill the credibility of both prizes.
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