You Know, The Omelet Thing

Barak Obama, winner of this year's Nobel Prize. Why not? He deserves one every bit as much as Jimmy Carter. Or Al Gore. Or Yasser Arafat. Winning a Nobel Prize is meaningless anymore. Being nominated for a Nobel Prize has probably always been meaningless. Hell, you can nominate your Aunt Harriet on the grounds she broke up a fight between neighborhood kids once, cooked them brownies and convinced them to make up. All you need is a few people to sign the petition to the nominating committee. Actually winning the damn thing used to have some gravitas. It showed that you actually accomplished something substantial. Now it doesn't matter if what you accomplish is relatively substandard, as long as your heart's in the right place according to Nobel Committee criterion.

Former President and Nobel Peace laureate Theodore Roosevelt, the man who proclaimed the US should "speak softly but carry a big stick", the man who, as ex-President, lambasted then current President Wilson for failing up to that point to enter World War I, would probably not qualify by the standards of today's Nobel Committee. The fact that he mediated the peace talks that ended the Russo-Japanese War would be an incidental detail hardly worth an honorable mention. The man was an obvious war-monger at heart.

Now, Obama is going to face added pressure to not send those extra troops to Afghanistan, and to end the thing as soon as possible-or to neuter our troops to the extent that he might as well end it and get it over with. He certainly seems to be dragging his feet on making the decision to send more troops or not.

Aside from playing good cop to Jimmy "Killer Rabbit" Carter's bad cop over the matter of the supposed racism inherent in the opposition to his policies, and calling Kanye West a jackass for his disruptive behavior during the MTV Video Awards (in what was billed as an "off-the-record" candid remark that was obviously staged), I'm having a hard time coming up with a firm position the man has taken on anything that goes against his party line or his general base of support.

Isn't the Nobel Prize supposed to go to people that actually accomplish something that leads to peace? Since when does a few speeches read from a teleprompter qualify? And why is it that qualifications for winning the prize seem limited to supporting policies that always seem to insure that wars will drag on seemingly forever and with far greater long-term loss of life and destruction of property, and with no apparent end in sight?

I have to wonder if pacifists actually need these wars to drag on, just to have an on-going illustration to point to when they wax poetic about just how awful it all is, and how above it all they all supposedly are.

After all, if somebody actually put their foot down and ended the shit that goes on in the world, by any means necessary, sure it would be bloody and destructive for a while, but in the long term, it might actually bring peace, with less loss of life, less severe injuries, and less destruction of property and infrastructure, and at far less expense. There is a precedent for all that, actually. It's called World War II. Unless of course you honestly believe the world would have been better off had Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini met with no real opposition. Personally, I don't buy that for a second, just like I don't buy for a second that the firm resolve shown by Reagan against the Soviet Union, which led at least in large part to that evil entities long-overdue collapse, was wrong-headed war-mongering.

History has shown, over and over again, that in the face of provocative actions from a determined and relentless foe, sometimes it becomes imperative to use deadly force, and more often than not, to continue until the enemy's will is broken, his resources are exhausted, and his country is subdued. An advancing and determined enemy never sues for peace, nor will he until he is finally broken and beaten.

But alas, too much of that, and it wouldn't be long before Aunt Harriet would be a top contender.