Rhetoric vs. Reality

It has just been announced that President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. We extend our congratulations to the President for this signal honor.

It must be said however that this honor ain't what it used to be. Consider the last two American recipients, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. Mr. Gore spouted the world party line on global warming, complete with prophecies of doom and anguished concern for the future, while brazenly backing it all up with phony hockey stick data and irrelevant pictures of dying Polar Bears. Jimmy Carter talked and walked the humanitarian line while he used his international fame to become a leftish scold of the West in general and the United States in particular, the two greatest humanitarian forces of the last few hundred years, and to embrace and applaud some of the most repugnant and dangerous dictators and terrorists in the world.

In both cases, the Nobel Committee chose the recipients based on rhetoric rather than reality, ignorant hope rather than actual accomplishment.

The deadline for submissions of nominations for the Prize was February of this year, which means, absurdly, that President Obama had only been on the job for a mere 10 days when nominations were closed. Since that time, President Obama has stirred the world with great oratories of U.S. guilt and repentance, paeans of praise for a multilateral policy of diplomacy, with special emphasis on world institutions like the U.N., and a vision of a "nuclear free world." However, that the U.S. has made mistakes in the past does not imply guilt and makes Obama's repentance a hollow declaration; an obsessive regard for multilateral diplomacy and talking, talking, talking, as is unfolding with a murderous Iran, treats the real dangers in the world today as if they don't exist; and a vision of a nuclear free world is as mythical and vapid a hope as any Beauty Pageants breathless plea for "World Peace."

In other words, President Obama has accomplished precisely nothing and his empty rhetoric does not encourage us to believe he will accomplish anything in the future. The Nobel Peace Prize, once a laudatory idea, now stands somewhere between those ubiquitous keys to the city handed out to famous visitors to small towns and a P.T. Barnum promotional campaign.