Apprised of the sudden and surprising change in maps worldwide, the Prime Shminister of Israel dispatched an intelligence detachment to slip into Lebanon and climb some Cedars.
‘I’m not seeing much of anything’ Agent Shlomo said, peering off into the distance, one hand holding onto a branch, the other poised over his brow.
Then: ‘Wait–hold it. Mmm…yup. Pyramids.’
Wingnut Halloween: Commie Nazi Muslim President Barack Obama awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
Boo! Well, now John Bolton will have to advocate bombing Scandinavia, too.
Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize
OSLO (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world “hope for a better future” and striving for nuclear disarmament, in a surprise award that drew criticism as well as praise.
The decision to bestow one of the world’s top accolades on a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, provoked gasps of surprise from journalists at the announcement in Oslo.
The first African-American to hold his country’s highest office, Obama has called for disarmament and worked to restart the stalled Middle East peace process since taking office in January.
“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 citation.
The more you think about it, the more you can understand how the surprise happened. His blunt assessments of American past mistakes in foreign policy had to give people a sense of a grounded presence in the role of ‘Leader of the Free World.’ His willingness to do the same for the actors in the Middle East, including Israel, while providing an outline for the future gave people some hope that sanity and rational thought might win out, even there. His opposition to settlements backed up that philosophy.
The fact that a President who is presiding over two wars fighting terrorism, who is about to change the Afghan strategy to chasing and killing Al Qaeda over the Taliban, could still get a Palestinian official to react to the award this way says quite a bit:
…the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, welcomed the award to Obama and expressed hope that “he will be able to achieve peace in the Middle East.”
That’s a shocking change in attitude from the Palestinians. This is the sort of the thing the committee was probably taking into account. More:
Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland rejected suggestions from journalists that Obama was getting the prize too early, saying it recognized what he had already done over the past year.
“We hope this can contribute a little bit to enhance what he is trying to do,” he told a news conference.
The committee said it attached “special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons,” saying he had “created a new climate in international politics.”
That is true. And remember this? The speech in Cairo, to ’seek a new beginning’? It was extraordinary.
That surely played a part in it, no President has ever given a speech remotely like it. And don’t forget what the entire continent of Africa feels about the guy:
Abroad, he is still widely seen around the world as an inspirational figure.
Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who had been tipped as a favorite for the prize, told Reuters that Obama was a deserving candidate and an “extraordinary example.”
Clearly, the committee wanted to get on the bandwagon with the new President to perhaps give him a little more star power and leverage in working in solving international problems. If he’s around for 8 years, his second term would be the one where real progress in the Middle East and combating nuclear proliferation could happen. This is an award more for what could happen than for what has happened, so it’s risky. It will be criticized quite a bit.
And does it say much for the Peace Prize news that the reactionary, violent peoples of the world, our wingnuts included, will speak and have already spoken up about it, and despise it?
Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party in Pakistan, called the award an embarrassing “joke.”
The Taliban: “We condemn the award of the Noble Peace Prize for Obama,” he said by telephone from an undisclosed location. “We condemn the institute’s awarding him the peace prize. We condemn this year’s peace prize as unjust.”
Expect more of that from the terrorists, the obstructionists in the Middle East and our American conservatives.