Today, I woke up to the news that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. My only surprise was that I hadn't thought of that happening before it happened. Seriously, he seems to fit in well with the ranks of Al Gore and Jimmy Carter, and we can only hope that he doesn't achieve Yasser Arafat status, but, well, whatever, the Nobel Prize is a joke.
Actually, it would be a joke, except for the fact that one million dollars are involved. The recipient of the prize gets a million dollars, and that makes a difference.
When Al Gore won the prize, Irena Sendler lost. Irena Sendler rescued over one thousand Jewish kids in the holocaust, was tortured by the nazis, and helped place the children after WWII ended. She lived through the days of Communist Poland, and, when she was nominated, was living in a nursing home, with not much more than a meager state pension to live on, and being taken care of by one of the children she rescued. Irena Sendler died later that year, with nothing, which is pretty much what she had had most of her life. She could have had something, but, instead, Al Gore bought a private jet.
We don't know exactly who Obama beat in the race for this prize, but there wasn't only one Irena Sendler in the world ... The people who win make the prize a joke, the people who lose make the prize annoying.
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I wondered what you'd say about this. I thought it was a joke. And you know that the deadline to nominate is in February, so he really hadn't done anything amazing by that point...other than being elected just because he is "cool." I just read an article about what the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said about it...not the best person, but it was funny. He said that "Obama had done nothing beyond wishful thinking to earn the Nobel Peace Prize."
ReplyDeleteAnd my personal favorite was when he said that "giving Obama the Nobel award was like giving a baseball pitcher a prize simply for saying he was going to win 50 games and strike out 500 batters." Ha!
LOL to both comments, cool. Too bad Obama hasn't opposed Chavez and others like him more to earn that prize ...
ReplyDeleteExactly. I just hope that Obama doesn't become to the Peace Prize what Egas Moniz is to the Medical Prize (1949 for the lobotomy, otherwise known as the "why fix a problem when you can make it worse and ignore it" operation.).