Like everyone in North America I woke to the news that President Obama had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. For a moment I too thought it was a joke, then the full realization of this event dawned on me. I don't speak Norwegian, so I assumed a newly updated translation of "Nobel" to English was, "Yeah... you're not that fucking idiot Dubya, so here's something." Obviously, that has to be the translation, because in the past decade, the prize has been given to no less than four individuals who have called or at least implied that George W. Bush was a war criminal, torturer-in-chief, environmental terrorist, global miscreant, and the worst president in the history of the USA.
Consider that a year after Dubya was appointed by the Supreme Court and weeks after he had his bullhorn moment on top of the ruins of the World Trade Center NY, the Nobel prize (on its centenary) was given to the United Nations and its leader Kofi Annan in recognition of it and its leader's involvement in multilateralism, international cooperation, and peaceful conflict resolution. Whilst the world grieved for the victims of 9-11, those with a knowledge of global wars were kindly reminding their American counterparts, that a collective threat to international stability needed a collective response and not cowboy antics.
In 2002, the world watched as the Bush Administration gave the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon free reign in dealing with the Palestinians. A parallel and even more disturbing march towards invading Iraq was being sold front and center by Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and the neocon trotskists. The Nobel committee looking for alternatives to the messianic-militarist's potential mayhem chose former US President Jimmy Carter, "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." This wasn't just a slap in Dubya's face; it was a shot by the international community against Bush's imperial over-reach and overt war-mongering.
In 2005, with not a milligram of WMDs to be found in the sands of Iraq and the further ramping up of neocon blather about invading Iran, the Nobel committee gave the award to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way." The decider by this moment in history had demolished decades worth of bilateral and international nuclear, chemical, and bio-weapons anti-proliferation treaties, was posed to develop new generation of atomic weapons that would be smaller and more "usable", and had allowed -under his dismal watch- Pakistan and North Korea to engage in nuclear proliferation with actual rogue entities.
By 2007, the toxic-Texan had served his oily corporate friends well in deigning the existence of climate change, the scientific method, and fact based reality. His government had cut science research funding across the board to pay for their Middle-Eastern war-mongering, were pushing creationist dogma in research universities, were filling the FDA with Pharma lobbyists, NASA with college dropouts who were religious zealots, the Department of the Interior with sex and drug fiends who gave away oil & gas rights to energy corporations, and the EPA with lobbyists from major polluters. An entire decade had been lost to prevent a catastrophe that will undermine human civilization. To the American Taliban, everything they needed to know was in the Bible, so why bother with these inconvenient truths that humanity was destroying the planet. To wit, the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."And today, eleven months after his election to the presidency of the United States of America the award was given to Barack Obama, "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." After eight hard years of decay and decline, the Nobel committee said thank God we have someone who can pronounce "NUCLEAR" properly in the White House. Of course, this really was never about Mr. Obama per se. This was about demarcating the ideologues who allowed the American nation to be attacked by terrorists, wage two failed wars, allow an American city to be nearly destroyed by neglect, preside over two recessions, have the entire global economy nearly collapse due to their crony-capitalist mantra, increase global terrorism and religious extremism, exacerbate nuclear proliferation, and condemn humanity to a future of unknown environmental horror.
Is it any wonder that only 23% of Americans now identify themselves with the Republican party?
