Month: October 2009

This seems to be all anyone wants to talk about. I seem to be one of the few who sees this as a downpayment on a potential transformative period in world history. History alone can judge that, and history hasn't happened yet. Michael Steele:

It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain — President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.

"Outshined?" DNC:

The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize.

Classy. I hate this loony partisanship. Ambers:

[O]ne argument I'm hearing and reading from Democrats and others who are skeptical of the prize: it will turn the volume and enthusiasm level all the way to the extreme end of the dial for conservatives — overmodulating at 110%; the resulting hyperpolarization will hurt Obama's agenda.

But they turned the volume up to 11 a day after his inauguration! He's already Hitler and Stalin combined to them. And, of course, their derangement has only accelerated their decline as a serious political party. Win-win for Obama. Lindsay Beyerstein:

Of course the Republicans are going to freak out. Our guy wins a Nobel Peace Prize after 9 months in office, primarily for tinkering with the worst excesses of the wars their guy started. That's humiliating. Humiliated Republicans lash out, news at eleven.

Joe Klein:

I'm as relieved as anybody that the Bushian gunslingers have been given the gate and, as regular readers know, I'm a big fan of patient, rigorous diplomacy–and there's a certain lovely irony to any prize that brings the Taliban and the neoconservative Commentary crowd together in high dudgeon–but let's face it: this prize is premature to the point of ridiculousness. It continues a pattern that holds some peril for Obama: he is celebrated for who he is not, and for who he might potentially be, rather than for what he has actually done. If he doesn't provide results that justify the award, this Nobel will prove a millstone come election time.

Freddie DeBoer:

No one is above the outrage cycle. We have now, in our culture, synthesized the two worst elements of pre-9/11 and post-9/11 media: the pre-9/11 obsession with meaningless bullshit; and the post-9/11 obsession with filling every story with apocalyptic portent and over the top, tween-girl-at-a-Jonas-brothers-concert hysteria. We still care too much about J-Lo’s dress and the Summer of the Shark. Now, we get around the idea that we are shallow for giving a shit about such things by infusing them with pseudo-political importance and our current national drug of choice, outrage. Everything is an outrage. Everyone is outraged. Every turn of the news cycle gives us a new opportunity to pound the table.

Coates:

My thoughts? I just don't think it matters much.

DiA:

One suspects that the Nobel committee may have been trying to reinvigorate their own public image by choosing someone "relevant", rather than someone like Thich Quang Do, the 80-year-old Vietnamese dissident monk. Or they may have wanted to lend Mr Obama some extra mojo for his upcoming pushes on climate change in the Senate and then in Copenhagen. But one fears the effect may be the opposite, on both counts. Every Facebook response I've seen so far has been a variation on the theme of "huh?" Maybe he can re-gift it somehow.

Matt Welch:

Among many other things, this selection illustrates the United States' way-too-oversized role in the world's imagination. And it shows how people–almost touchingly–remain suckers for likeable politicians who replace guys they hated, investing in them a kind of faith mere mortals usually don't merit. As Chili Davis famously (and presciently) said about Dwight Gooden, "He ain't God, man."

Party ID over the last year:

As the base has become more enraged, and the conservative-industrial complex appeals more and more to the already converted, the party’s image slumps even deeper than during the last election. I wonder if this has even occurred to Roger Ailes. Or if he even cares.

Highlights from the next British prime minister’s speech to his pre-election party conference. He started with Afghanistan, and he focused on poverty, and ended with the Monkees: Frankly, I preferred William Hague’s realism (but I’m biased):

Goldblog responds:

[W]hile the world has an obligation to understand Israel and its motivations (or, at least, an abiding interest in gaining such an understanding) Israel has an interest in understanding why the world might see some of its actions as excessive. I'm not referring here to Israel's reaction to the Goldstone report, which was a pre-cooked travesty, but to more legitimate criticism about its settlements and its actions in Gaza. I'm not arguing that Israel must agree with every criticism, but I am arguing that not every single criticism of Israel is motivated by a desire to exterminate the Jewish state.

Ronald Krebs:

The Nobel Peace Prize's aims are expressly political. The Nobel committee seeks to change the world through the prize's very conferral, and, unlike its fellow prizes, the peace prize goes well beyond recognizing past accomplishments. As Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the 1990s, once proudly admitted, "The prize … is not only for past achievement. … The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] … Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act."

George Packer:

President Obama should thank the Nobel committee and ask them to hold on to the Peace Prize for a couple more years…This seems like a prize for Europeans, not Americans, and I worry that at home it will damage him politically by reinforcing the notion that he is—and will be—a world icon rather than a successful President. I don’t mind him being the former, but I most want him to be the latter. Not even a Rookie of the Year is ready to be elected to the Hall of Fame. I’m afraid this prize will be bad for Obama. For political reasons and on the merits, he should quote Shakespeare to the Nobel committee: “As you shall prove me, praise me.”

Mickey Kaus:

Turn it down! Politely decline. Say he’s honored but he hasn’t had the time yet to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. Result: He gets at least the same amount of glory–and helps solve his narcissism problem and his Fred Armisen (’What’s he done?’) problem, demonstrating that he’s uncomfortable with his reputation as a man overcelebrated for his potential long before he’s started to realize it.

Spencer Ackerman:

[T]urning it down would be a slap in the face to an international community that is showing, in the most generous way possible, that it wants the U.S. back as a leading component of the global order. The issue is not Barack Obama. It’s what the president represents internationally: a symbol of an America that is willing, once again, to drive the international system forward, together, toward the humane positive-sum goals of peace and disarmament. The fact that Obama hasn’t gotten the planet there misses the point entirely. It’s that he’s beginning, slowly, to take the world again down the path.

David Frum:

From the age of 20, Barack Obama has collected acclaim, awards and prizes not for his accomplishments (which have always been rather scanty), but for his potential. You think with the guy nearing 50 and elected president of the United States that the prizes for “most promising young man” would cease. But no! The Nobel Committee has just awarded him one more.

The Taliban:

We have seen no change in his strategy for peace. He has done nothing for peace in Afghanistan.

Josh Marshall:

This is an odd award. You'd expect it to come later in Obama's presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.

Jake Tapper:

Apparently the standards are more exacting for an ASU honorary degree these days.

Rod Dreher:

The Nobel committee has awarded Obama its Peace prize for the grand achievement of not being George W. Bush. I don't see any other way to explain this decision. Again, it doesn't reflect poorly on Obama, but rather on the Nobel committee, which looks petty and political. On the other hand, none of us are George W. Bush either, so maybe we can dare to dream that the Norwegians will gift us with the Nobel Peace prize next year. Personally, I would use the prize money to foster understanding between peoples, and to buy silken slankets for the whole family.

Glenn Greenwald:

We're currently occupying and waging wars in two separate Muslim countries and making clear we reserve the "right" to attack a third.  Someone who made meaningful changes to those realities would truly be a man of peace.  It's unreasonable to expect that Obama would magically transform all of this in nine months, and he certainly hasn't.  Instead, he presides over it and is continuing much of it.  One can reasonably debate how much blame he merits for all of that, but there are simply no meaningful "peace" accomplishment in his record — at least not yet — and there's plenty of the opposite.  That's what makes this Prize so painfully and self-evidently ludicrous.      

Jim Henley:

I like to think that all people of good will, no matter our opinions on health-insurance reform, a second stimulus or cap-and-trade legislation, can agree that awarding the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is one of the bigger fucking absurd fucking travesties of a low fucking dishonest fucking decade.

Marc Lynch:

Based on conversations in Amman there's not going to be much Arab enthusiasm for Obama peace prize.

Sorry, I was up till 2 finishing my column.

If any person has done more to advance some measure of calm, reason and peace in this troubled word lately, it's president Obama. I think the Cairo speech and the Wright speech alone merited this both bridging ancient rifts even while they remain, of course, deep and intractable. He has already done more to heal the open wound between the West and Islam than anyone else on the planet.

I'd just add one caveat: the American people who elected him deserve part of the credit too. Now he needs partners to help him.

AllahPundit:

Am I awake?

TigerHawk:

“YO OBAMA, I’M GONNA LET YOU FINISH, BUT I JUST WANNA SAY THAT MARTIN LUTHER KING JR WAS THE BEST NOBEL PRIZE WINNER OF ALL TIME.”

Dan Riehl:

Are you frickin' kidding me?

Steve Benen:

I didn't even know he'd been nominated.

Case3L:

He was the 10th caller.

Alex Massie:

The Nobel Peace Prize Jumps the Shark

A reader writes:

Andrew! Wake Up! Wake up wake up wake up!

Crooked Timber:

Peace, dude

James Fallows:

Yes, that Olympic rejection really makes Obama look weak…

The Corner:

1994: Yasser Arafat

Conservatives4Palin:

this is complete lunacy

Robert Gibbs:

Wow.

It appears so.

 

(Hat tip: Daily What)

Charles Murray on winning converts:

[W]hat if I had entitled Losing Ground something like Liberal Cruelty? It probably would have sold a lot more than the meager 27,000 copies it actually sold on release. Would the book have had as much impact? That's the koan. I'm sure Jonah can give me examples of people who did pick up Liberal Fascism even though they hated the title, but I'll still bet he lost a lot of people who would have been Adeeply affected by his argument if they had read the book. We are indeed engaged in a battle for America's soul, but the way that battle is conducted makes a big difference.

The goal–at least my goal, but I think it is Steve's and Jonah's as well–is not to elect a Republican majority to Congress. That's not our job, and it's not as if Republican congresses were so wonderful anyway. Our job is to engage in a debate on great issues and make converts to our point of view. The key word is converts–referring to people who didn't start out agreeing with us. We shouldn't be civil and reasonable just because we want to be nice guys. It is the only option we've got if we want to succeed instead of just posture. The Glenn Becks of the world posture, and make our work harder.

(Hat tip: Dreher)