When I turned on the news this morning to digest with my eggs and sausage, it's a good thing I didn't have a mouthful of coffee when I heard that President Barack Hussein Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. WTF? He had been in office a grand total of two weeks when the nominees list for this year's peace prize was drawn up by the Nobel committee. And what had he accomplished toward world peace in those first two weeks? About exactly what he has accomplished since on any goal. Nada. Nuthin'. Zip. So far, Obama's legacy is a big fat zero.Of course, the Nobel Peace Prize has become a total joke in recent years. Obama joins such former luminaries of world peace in or near the White House as...
Former President Jimmy Carter won the award in 2002, while former Vice President Al Gore shared the 2007 prize with the U.N. panel on climate change.Just what did Jimmy Carter do for world peace? Well he got Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat to sit down for "peace talks" with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, for which that odd trio won the 1994 Nobel peace prize. And of course, those historic talks hosted by President Jimmy Carter resulted in peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, didn't they? Well let's not quibble over details like actual peace breaking out.
And of course, Al Gore has brought world peace with his Chicken Little crusade on global warming, which the leftwingnuts are still blathering about despite the recent trend toward global cooling. But again, let's not quibble over details like actual science vs. junk science.
So in the spirit of Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Yasser Arafat, the Nobel committee has picked yet another luminary of world peace, Barack Hussein Obama, who has accomplished ... nothing.
Meredith Jessup at Townhall.com comments:
Not only is this award INCREDIBLY premature since Obama has only been in office just over nine months, but also pretty inappropriate. Teddy Roosevelt ended the Russo-Japanese War and received the prize, and Obama... what? Gave a speech in Cairo?Wesley Pruden, who penned this morning's column in advance of the Obama Nobel prize announcement, is yet quite accurate in describing the "peace accomplishments" on the world scene thus far by our rookie president, whose trademark "dithering" continues on a host of pressing world peace matters, such as Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and Eastern Europe.
The cruel world is closing in on Barack Obama. Springfield was never like this. The president can only look back with yearning for the days when he was the star of the state legislature, where a legislator's only concern is who's going to pick up the tab for drinks and supper.
His dithering time in the big new world is limited by events, which occur to a timetable that mere man, even a minor-league messiah, cannot control.
The White House insists that the president is hard at work on what to do about Afghanistan, and whether to send more troops to fuel a "surge" like the surge that prevented a collapse of the West's attempt to rescue Iraq from barbarism and restore a fragile semblance of civilization. The brave young Americans put in harm's way in that godforsaken corner of the world often feel abandoned in a hopeless cause, so the president should feel the pressure to act, and quickly.
But the problem is "multilayered," his spokesman says. Translated into real English, that means "he hasn't yet figured out which layer of public opinion to appease, and which layer to disappoint." He'll do something as soon as he figures out which disappointed layer would squeak loudest and scream longest.
The Pakistanis occupy still another layer. The president is looking for a way to motivate an ally that doesn't want to be motivated. Money is usually the great motivator, and the administration proposes to send the generals who run Pakistan $7.5 billion in aid over the next five years, to, er, ah, ummmm, uh, well, it's not clear what, exactly. They'll think of something. The generals want to make sure the money arrives in Pakistan with no strings attached. It's not as if we're talking about real money.
Still another layer is the arsenal of nuclear weapons the Paks already have, and a layer beyond that is the nuclear weapon Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in neighboring Iran is about to have, unless the president gets out of the way and lets the Israelis resolve the dilemma. This would free him to figure out a way to abandon Israel to the terrorists without making noise that would drown out the speech he would make as a consolation prize for the Jews and their Christian allies. He has a useful precedent, having recently thrown the Poles and Czechs under his famous bus (joining his grandmother), to appease the Russians angered by the prospect of a NATO missile base in Poland and the Czech Republic.
On another front, the dollar is shrinking so fast - more than 11 percent over the past few months - that it might disappear before the rest of the world abandons it as the reserve currency. But the most dangerous layer of presidential concerns, if you believe certain European descendants of Chicken Little, is what to do about global warming.
So there you have it in Pruden's insightful analysis, the accomplishments on the world scene of our Dither-In-Chief during his term in office thus far.
Meanwhile, back on the dithering front, the White House has decided the President is just too busy right now for General McChrystal, our top commander in Afghanistan, to come to Washington to brief his staff and Congress. So they put McChrystal on hold for a while. Again.
The White House has told the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan to delay a planned trip here Friday to brief President Obama and his senior advisers on his recommendation for a major troop increase.
Officials had hoped to have Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and what national security adviser James L. Jones called "all the key players" speak to Obama in person by the end of this week, leading to final deliberations over a forward strategy.
But "we're not finished," Jones said Thursday, and meetings may extend beyond next week. When the White House is ready, he said, McChrystal -- along with the U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan and Pakistan -- will fly to Washington so that the three "can meet with the president before a decision is made."
Well that's magnanimous of Obama, to allow McChrystal to come to Washington and meet with him "before a decision is made." Thus far, our busy President has has exactly one 25-minute conversation face-to-face with the top commander in Afghanistan while he has been busily crafting a "new strategy" for the war in Afghanistan. And when he's finished crafting that new strategy, he will allow McChrystal another brief photo-op in the White House before announcing his new strategy, which has been realistically described as the "cut and walk" plan for the war, which is somewhere halfway between "cut and run" and sending troops to actually win the war.
The Democratic chairmen of several key committees overseeing war policy, including the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees, say they back the military's request for a troop buildup in Afghanistan - despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stance that Congress will not support deploying more U.S. forces.
At a White House meeting this week, participants said about half of the chairmen from the dozen House and Senate panels involved in military issues told President Obama that they supported ordering more troops to Afghanistan.
"A number of us commented that we don't believe you can prevail with a counterterrorism plan alone. You have to have a more comprehensive strategy," said Rep. Silvestre Reyes, Texas Democrat and chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who attended the meeting.
Perhaps there is some sanity in the real world after all, vs. the insanity of Nobel Peace Prize alternate universe logic. I for one pray for our troops and for victory in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a famous general said, in war there is no substitute for victory.
Oops. I wasn't supposed to quote General MacArthur. He's the leftwingnuts' current example of a bad general as they compare McChrystal to President Harry Truman's firing of MacArthur.
After all, what did MacArthur accomplish, besides leading our troops to victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II and then returning to do it again on the battlefields of Korea?
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