Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize
by John T. Reed

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Follow-up to this article which was originally written when it was announced that Obama had won the peace prize.

It is safe to say the Nobel committee wishes it had never given the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama.

• They were deservedly ridiculed worldwide for awarding it to a guy who did nothing to earn it.
• He refused to participate in the various award ceremony activities that other winners traditionally have gratefully participated in namely,

• dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee
• a press conference
• a television interview
• appearances at a children's event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as
• a visit to an exhibition in his honor at the Nobel peace center.
• lunch with the King of Norway

• He used his speech to talk down to the Nobel committee as if they did not know that evil exists, diplomacy is not always enough, that their awarding him the prize did not have any effect on his willingness to surge the war in Afghanistan.

Normally, such an aceptance speech would be interrupted by applause repeatedly. I believe Obama was only interrupted by applause once at the Nobel ceremony: when he reminded the audience of his pledge to close Guantanamo. He did not remind them that he reneged on that pledge. Gitmo was supposed to close 12/31/09. It will not. It is the best, newest American prison. The inmates themselves probbaly would prefer to be there than in any oter U.S. prison.

That applause line also included condemnation of America for torture and patting himself on the back for ending it, but he did not mention continuing rendition or shipping prisoners to countries who have no qualms about torturing prisoners.

In short, his response to being awarded the prize was to bite the hand that fed it to him and poke a stick in their eye. Explain to me again how this guy is a great politician. He has a gift, Harry, it’s a gift for pissing off his supporters while simultaneously keeping his opponens as pissed off at him a they always were.

Should not have been a surprise

In my book How to Manage Residential Property For Maximum Cash Flow and Resale Value, I talk at length about firing employees. One important point I made is that it should never come as a surprise to the person being fired.

If they commit an egregious offense, that calls for one-strike-and-you’re-out firing, like being drunk on duty, the fact that such an offense was one-strike should have been made known to the employee when they were hired.

If, on the other hand, they are being fired for an accumulation of substandard performances, they should have been warned privately that their performance needed to be improved or they were going to get fired. I had a salaried leasing agent once who never rented an apartment. My other leasing agent was leasing apartments. I warned that non-leaser than although she was not on commission, a zero batting average was unacceptable. She did not improve it and I fired her, which she deemed “unfair.”

Nobel prizes should not come as surprises

The same is true of Nobel prizes. The announcement of a winner should not surprise anyone who is reasonably well informed.

The announcement that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize did surprise everyone, including Obama himself.

The reason it came as a surprise is that Obama did virtually nothing that would have caused anyone to speculate that he might get it.

To his credit, Obama said he did not deserve the prize. I agree. Although, I could have done without the humility angle on the did-not-deserve comment. He did not deserve it because he did nothing to earn it, not because of his general unworthiness to be in the company of the other prior winners.

The Nobel Committee seemed to say they awarded it to him because of his various speeches advocating world peace. So award it to the Miss America Pageant. Their contestants all advocate world peace (and ending hunger) every year.

Nominated in February

Obama was nominated for the prize on February 1, 2009. Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.

The implication is that he was nominated for the prize for his actions during an 11-day period right after inauguration. What? Announcing that he was going to close Guantanamo by the end of the year—a promise since withdrawn?

Based in part on explanatory statements by the Nobel committee, they gave him the award to help him succeed in future peace efforts. So the Nobel Prize committee is like the U.S. media: in the tank for Obama and trying to propagandize the public to supporting their guy.

Limbaugh also said they seem to be trying to influence him to run American foreign policy hereafter in accordance with the wishes of the leftist intellectuals who vote on the prize.

Both explanations seem reasonable. He sure as heck did not get it for anything he has done which is the only proper criterion for such an award

Past winners

Nobel prizes awarded in the hard sciences have a well-deserved stellar reputation. However, the Nobel prizes awarded in soft subjects, like economics, peace, and so on, are subjective and political. Here are some other Nobel Peace Prize winners

Tighten the criteria

I am not suggesting they abolish the Nobel Peace Prize. Rather, they need to tighten the criteria for awarding it. Some years, they have not awarded it to anyone. They need to do that more often. In 1906, they awarded it to Teddy Roosevelt who hosted the peace talks and drew up the peace agreement that ended the war between Russia and Japan. That was an appropriate award. Jimmy Carter, who is a horse’s ass in general, should have gotten it in 1978 for doing what Teddy did only between Egypt and Israel. Carter did get it later in 2002 as a sort of lifetime achievement award. My take on him is that he never got over losing the 1980 election to Reagan and has since spent his life trying to prove the American people were wrong to reject him. His greatest success while president was arguably the Egypt peace agreement, so he keeps trying to reprise that event like has-been actress Norma “All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up” Desmond in the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard.

We have elected a president of the United States who is a sociopath with narcissistic personality disorder. I fear he will get us into World War III either by weakness or by falling prey to a need to prove his manhood because of his total lack of military or foreign policy experience. Michelle Obama said her husband is overconfident. He seems to think he can schmooze and mediate all of the bad guys in the world into behaving. He can’t. He wasn’t even successful with a Harvard professor and a Cambridge cop. The Nobel Committee is encouraging him to continue believing that. The awarding of the Nobel Prize to him is not useful and is likely to encourage him in his dangerous delusions and encourage him to be biased against sometimes necessary military action in dealings with deadly enemies.

John T. Reed