Obama's Nobel Prize Travesty

In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama for exactly 12 days of presidential performance and a whole lot of unrealized potential, the Nobel committee has reduced itself to the credibility of a beauty pageant panel who selects Paris Hilton as the winner. Is there no end to what Obama's charisma will get for him? Oh yes—almost forgot, there will be no summer Olympics in Chicago in 2016, will there? And maybe that has a little something to do with this latest twist.

As a Detroit News editorial stated, the Nobel award should come as no real surprise since this is the way Obama's entire career has worked. He was elected to the U.S. Senate and then to the presidency in such rapid succession because he packaged himself—and was sold as—someone with such tremendously upside political potential that the sky was the limit. And even the Nobel committee acknowledged that the award was based more on what they are projecting that Obama will do than what very little he's already done. But there may be more to it than that.

After the Olympic fiasco and the subsequent fallout, perhaps the leftist elites who fancy themselves as those who run the world had a few conversations and decided that it wasn't good to allow their man in Washington to look bad for very long. So there may have been some pressure applied to the Nobel committee, not that there needed to be an excessive amount. After all, this is the same crew of leftists who have awarded Nobel prizes to the likes of Jimmy Carter and Al Gore; arguably Obama represents a mere continuation of the trend.

But let's return to the committee's own admission that the award was based in large part on the potential that Obama has to bring about world peace. The members may just be telling Obama that the award is a nice little prize that they're bestowing to make sure that when they pull the strings, he dances to their tune. They, good one-world government leftists all, like the sound of a world leader—particularly from the U.S.—preaching from the bully pulpit of the U.N. about a world without nuclear weapons, including of course the world's leading superpower up until now.

Making an award wholly without merit sends so many terrible signals that it's impossible to name them all. Suffice it to say that despite its plummeting credibility, the Nobel still provides a force field around the winner that prevents a meltdown, no matter how hypocritical (read: Gore) or delusional (read: Carter) the recipient's behavior is. And given Obama's outsized ego, the Nobel committee has not done the United States any favors in bestowing this undeserved award on him. Which may be just as they planned it.