The Leftist We Like This Year Prize
So President Obama has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. I woke up to hearing that this morning and I thought it was a joke. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee lost credibility long ago, but this really tops it off. I just…. I don’t know what to say. I’m speechless. The nomination had to be submitted by 10 days into his presidency. Someone on the radio noted that when the president gave the commencement address at Arizona State University earlier this year, the university determined that he did not yet have enough of a body of work to merit an honorary degree; but apparently his existing body of work is plenty for the Nobel Peace Prize folks.
Maybe President Obama can give his $1.4 million prize to fund the Iranian human rights abuse investigative agency that his State Department recently defunded. Oh wait — that was defunded because there are absolutely no human rights abuses in Iran these days worthy of investigation.
This thing is pretty comical, and I will try to laugh instead of cry, except that it’s deadly serious. The security and freedom of our country and the world are at stake and we have leftists paling around with terrorists and dictators and world bodies applauding them for it. Heaven help us.
October 9th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Three thoughts.
1) Arizona State was mocked pretty soundly at the time for not thinking him accomplished enough.
2) Sometimes it feels like we libs can’t win. We’re supposed to stop funding everything important to us because it’s someone else’s tax dollars, but at the same time, if we *do* defund anything, we’re castigated for that, too.
3) Finally, it’s too early for this. He’s definitely raised the perception of America in the world, a world that Bush terrified because of his unilateralism, but I agree. He doesn’t deserve this yet. I think he knows it (he said so), but he’s accepting the award in the spirit of it. (As another commentator put it, it would look even more arrogant to decline, suggesting to the committee that he knows better than they do who should win).
October 10th, 2009 at 11:37 am
We conservatives don’t want to fund things that are important to “us.” We want the government to fund only things that are an appropriate function of the government. And we have the Constitution to tell us what those functions are. So for example, as worthwhile a cause as I think Birthright is and as good a job as I think they do, I absolutely don’t want the government funding Birthright. We make a special effort to fund Birthright out of our pockets because it is important to us. We don’t try to get tax dollars to do that.
In a strict constructionist sense, perhaps the federal government shouldn’t be funding the Iranian human rights abuse investigative agency. And if it had been defunded as part of an overall effort to cut out government spending on all sorts of things the government shouldn’t be spending money on, I’d cheer that. But it’s being defunded at a time that the Obama administration is spending (wasting) money on “Cash for Clunkers” and spending taxpayer “economic stimulus” money to put $500,000 into the Chicago school district where that poor boy was brutally beaten to death by gang bangers. Because more money solves violence, and anti-violence programs stimulate the economy, right? Yeah, right. So in that sort of spending context, I will fault them for defunding that investigative agency. Especially since President Obama wants to buddy up to the Iranian regime, a self-professed lethal enemy of the United States and our allies.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Oh, I take your point. We diverge on how we treat the Constitution: I view it as a living document, subject to change and, like Scripture, interpretation and re-interpretation… Heh, it all comes back to religious belief, doesn’t it?
I’m never going to agree 100 percent with anything any politician does. Heck, if *I* were a politician, I probably wouldn’t agree 100 percent with everything *I* did. Political expediency requires compromise–one more reason I wouldn’t go into politics.
Personally, the thing that’s burned me up the most from the last administration was the funding for abstinence-only programs in public schools–primarily because the poor results of such programs are well-documented.
All funding for everything, from wars to roads to civil rights to clunkers, has an agenda.