Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

US President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. The president who has accomplished nothing in regard to anything has won a discredited prize—and in his first year in office, no less. The cult of the divine Obama. And for the first time ever (please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong), it appears that the prize has been given not for achievements or accomplishments, but for what the prize winner might be able to achieve in the future. It almost feels as if the world is reverting to post-Republican Rome, when the Principate Emperors were deified in life and deemed to be Gods on earth living amongst us.

Frankly, I thought the news story that Obama had won was a joke at first glance. But it actually doesn’t surprise me all that much—as I wrote about the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007:

That Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on encouraging world governments to tackle global warming shows how much a leftist joke the post-Cold War Nobel committe has become. (Not since Arafat (1994) Jimmy Carter (2002) has the prize been such a big joke.)

Looks like I need to revise that blurb, and in future it will read, “Not since Arafat (1994) Jimmy Carter (2002) Al Gore (2007) Barack Obama (2009) has the prize been such a big joke.”

All of this being said, I must admit that it was a pretty crap year for peace. The other potential winners discussed in the press were pretty lackluster people—Zimbabwe’s prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a Colombian senator, a Chinese dissident, and an Afghan women’s rights activist. Was their someone better to choose? In a year when peace has taken a back burner to everything else, perhaps not.