RT @dmataconis How can Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize on the same day that he’s becoming the first POTUS to bomb the Moon?
RT @dmataconis How can Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize on the same day that he’s becoming the first POTUS to bomb the Moon?
Um, aren’t you forgetting about the Beer Summit? A Nobel was a given…
I agree with this randomly chosen CNN source:
“I am a genuine admirer of Obama. And I am very pleased that George W. Bush is no longer president. But I doubt that I am alone in wondering whether this award is slightly premature. It is hard to point to a single place where Obama’s efforts have actually brought about peace – Gaza, Iran, Sri Lanka?
“While it is OK to give school children prizes for ‘effort’ — my kids get them all the time — I think international statesmen should probably be held to a higher standard,” he wrote.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/09/obama.nobel.international.reaction/index.html
Also…
Is it just me, or does anyone else have a sneaking suspicion that Carter began going off the reservation around the time he started to come up in Nobel conversations?
Further, I am fully, completely, and utterly not aligned with the neocon view that seems to suggest we should bomb everyone and everything in sight. (Except the moon – you can never trust those bastards). I vastly prefer a more realpolitikish, Sun-Tzu-type approach to international conflict.
Having said that, sometimes your enemy’s interests are hopelessly nonaligned with yours, and the only thing left to do is to bomb them. Does a Nobel Peace Prize, for an inexperienced foreign policy President, effectively take the “bomb them” option off the table, since the Nobel burdens the bomb decision with the implications of being the Nobel Peace Prize winner?
Jazz, you should be ashamed of yourself for siding with the terrorists!
You know, I was going to try to be funny in response to Joe Mama at #4, saying something along the lines of “Guys like Kissinger and I, we don’t side with terrorists…though they may think we do, until we have wrung all concessions from them, destroying them and making us stronger”. Not that funny, yes, yes.
But then it occured to me: you know, in this hyper-opinionated, bloggy era, its awfully hard to practice realpolitik successfully. How does one do nuance when the zeitgeist is filled with shouted opinion? In setting the trap for your enemy, using the bait of niceties and whatnot, won’t your political opponent fill the blogosphere with condemnation for the niceties and whatnot? This internet thingy may bode poorly for the US.
That said, if we are forced to live in a world lacking nuance, about one thing I can be certain:
To Joe Mama’s link…I will (almost) never side with Michael Steele.
Come to think of it, based on the precedent set by the last guy, the fact that Obama hasn’t started any wars is pretty damn impressive, maybe thats why he got the Peace Prize.