Saturday October 10, 2009

MORE NOBELONEY. In comments to the previous post about the Peace Prize, chuckling makes an excellent point:

While I don’t think Obama deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize... Since the announcement of the prize, just about every comment I've read from the left expresses some variant of that opinion. Within minutes, literally minutes, the phrase became the required disavowel of liberal accomplishment of the day..."

For normal people, jawing over who shoulda or shouldn'ta got awards is a pleasant intellectual exercise. But for the rightbloggers it's a tactic in their ceaseless war to discredit everything except their own prejudices and hare-brained schemes.

Recall what happened when Pinter won the Literature Prize. (Also see the updates here.) Conservative buffoons, most of whom could not demonstrate familiarity with a single Pinter play, howled at the injustice of it. They only knew that Pinter was left-wing, and that his works did not resemble their preferred reading materials (i.e., Joel Osteen and Gor novels), and that was good enough for outrage. They don't discuss literature or politics or prizes or anything else: they purr when they're stroked and spit when they're threatened.

As to Obama, commenters have plenty of other good points. cleter notes that "Obama is responsible for saving the world from the horror of a McCain/Palin administration." They should have put that on the citation. And Doghouse Riley brings it all back home: "Take it up with the fucking Committee. I don't remember them clearing Milton's Friedman's award with me first." This is a medal we're talking about here, not a public office. They can always make one of their own and give it whomever they want. Then they can complain that it isn't as well-known as the Nobel for the same reason Pajamas TV isn't as popular as piano-playing cat videos: Liberal media bias.