If Obama had any integrity at all, he would have refused the Nobel Peace Prize.
Maybe in a couple years, Barack could have earned the peace prize. But certainly not now. Clearly not for the events between noon on January 20, 2009 and midnight January 31, 2010, for which this award is bestowed. None but the blindest partisans think he deserves the award.
Worse, he has now lost the chance to ever earn it fairly. A greatness he probably believes he has, and is eager to demonstrate, will go unhonored because some idiots in Norway had a crush on him. No true competitor wants the gold medal without running and winning the race, and that probably applies to Barack Obama.
Nothing truly good ever came on a silver platter, even if it was a gold medallion.
The harm done to Barack Obama by this award is similar to that done by praise too freely given to children and the unfair advantages associated with affirmative action.
Many children today, stewed in the self-esteem cult of contemporary homes and schools, are praised for everything, even failing. “Good try!” is shouted from the sidelines of countless athletic contests as a youngster has failed to make a play. High grades get smiley faces and low grades get smiley faces and everybody gets praised, and at the same time, equalized into the social common. Every child is the smartest and the prettiest and the result is a generation of talentless, lazy little narcissists with a massive chip on their shoulder.
But worse than being unexceptional, those children are deprived of praise truly earned. If you are a little hero for getting a "C", what does the praise really mean when you work hard and get an "A"? Like the movie says, “If everyone is special, no one is special.” And the child who excels, who works hard and achieves something worthwhile, hears praise that is cheapened by its ubiquity.
Affirmative action, passing out scholarships and jobs and promotions and praise on the basis of race or gender or handicap or religion, likewise cheapens genuine achievement. If someone in a favored class works and excels and earns a scholarship or a promotion or something of the sort, the victory is tainted to an extent because the same reward is given equally to those who have not achieved.
Unearned praise damages the person who has earned praise.
I kind of feel sorry for Obama... Kind of.
The Nobel committee ripped him off. As is always the case when something is given undeserved and unearned, he has lost the opportunity to prove himself.
The Nobel Peace Prize is probably something Barack Obama has daydreamed about. His astounding sense of entitlement and self no doubt had led him to believe that one day he would receive the Nobel prize.
And who knows, maybe someday he would have earned it. He certainly has a global view of himself, as a leader whose abilities and charms know no limit. And maybe after a year or four or eight he might actually have done something that, in honest assessment, merited the prize.
But now we’ll never know.
Now he’ll never receive it honestly.
His chance to prove himself was stolen by Norwegian propagandists.
They cheated not just history, but him.
