Nobel Peace Prize a Surprise?

"Shock" waves were registered on the seismograph of public opinion the other day when the Nobel Peace Prize committee announced Barack Obama was the 2009 winner. I'm not sure why?

It didn't surprise me at all. After all, it follows historical precedent...and history pretty much tells us everything about the present and the future.

If you look back at the prizes awarded over the last century you will find the accolades and "job descriptions" of most recipients were simply stated at "Pacifist."

The vast majority of the winners were also total unknowns...never to be heard from again. There were some notable individuals of course; Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Albert Schweitzer, and a few others who actually dared to challenge convention and put themselves in harm's way. But the majority were simply considered important for their vision of a perfect world without conflict...visions they could do nothing to make come about of course...but gushy and warm visions nonetheless.

Three American presidents have received the award; Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter.

Roosevelt actually threatened to send the Marines into any nation that disturbed the peace...and he did it once or twice...scaring the bad guys into taking on more peaceful demeanors. He actually won the award for this behavior. It was obviously a different committee in 1906.

Wilson won for helping to establish the League of Nations. This was a good indicator where the committee was going...results no longer mattered...only vision. Wilson also dragged America kicking and screaming into a European war that historians are still trying to figure out where our national interest came in. And he threw a couple of hundred thousand Americans into prison for protesting that war...the new progressivism at work.

That's real Peace Prize stuff!

Jimmy Carter was the only presidential winner who took part in something that is still tangible and intact...the Sinai Peace Accords. Good for him, good for everyone for that matter, and he won the award for it. Recently he doesn't seem pleased by this feat however, and appears to wish Israel no longer existed...maybe it's old age.

Underneath the surface desire for peace at any price, the little group of Swedish left wingers who choose the winners seem also intent on rewarding those who help bring down the evil and imperialist American economy...which they probably view as a "war machine." Wilson put us onto the road of Corporatism and wage and price controls which brought us the great depression...sometimes referred to as America's Golden Age by left wing nut jobs world wide.

Carter brought us 25% intereste mortgage rates, 12% inflation, and the greatest unemployment since the depression. Americans found his one term to be more than enough. For some strange reason they did not desire another "Golden Age." But it made him a leftie icon.

Now we see the weird, offwordly, economic theories of Obama's close friends being attempted on a federal level. Not surprisingly the Nobel committee actually commends them for their attacks on the free market...perhaps part of the reason Obama was nominated as a prize recipient only two weeks into his lackluster presidency. Perhaps a huge part.

They've done stranger things. Al Gore shared the prize with the UN's commission on climate change. But he saved the world from turning into a massive oven and exploding messily all over the solar system...and just in time. And Al did it by simply making a video and millions of dollars off feeble-minded celebrities by selling them "carbon credits."

Now most of that UN commission have quit the group in disgust. The group's new motto is "We thought it was Global Warming...but now it's Global Cooling...but it's still Climate Change...and we know you peasants are to blame."

Catchy, eh? But how many carbon credits will it sell?

So should anyone be "shocked" that an American politician with a fuzzy grasp of world history, no understanding of geo-strategy or conflict resolution, who degrades the evil West, with a vision of a weapons-free world full of bunny rabbits and butterflies and no realistic concept of how to get there, should win a Noble Peace prize?

Duuuuhhhhhh...of course not. I actually predicted it would happen at some point. I didn't think it would be so soon...but maybe they wanted to do it before his administration did something so stupid that even the media would notice. And with decisions having to be made in regards to the war on terror and Islamic Fascism...that could be any day now.

The bunnies and butterflies were a nice idea...but I think the Taliban would have gassed the butterflies, then shot and eaten the bunnies. What can you do? Next year you give the Taliban the prize.

The Professor