In what has to be one of the most dramatic examples of the global elitist genuflection and obsequiousness before the presence of The One, it was announced today the President Barrack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
LONDON (MarketWatch) — U.S. President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday.
The committee cited Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
The committee said Obama had created “a new climate in international politics.”
“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said, in a news release. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”
When this item showed up in my email this morning the first thought was that it was a joke. But then I remembered that the Nobel committee’s judgment has been routinely dynamited before such as when they chose AlGore(2007), Jimmy Carter (2002) and, the pièce de résistance, Arafat (1994).
The news release by the Nobel committee could easily read as satire.
Note: The New York Times calls it a stunning surprise. Well, it was for most everyone else, but a cynic might suspect the Times has been pushing hard on this for months.
Update: I like Rick Moran’s take on this:
Sometimes, an event occurs that is so sublimely ridiculous that it becomes a parody of itself. That’s what we have here.
And Obama thought last week’s Olympic debacle was bad. The Nobel committee has unwittingly brought another weekend of derision to this president.