It’s hard to be humble when you’re One-derful

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Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble
when you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror
cause I get better looking each day.

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From Tony Harnden at The Telegraph :

The conventional wisdom is that President Barack Obama was embarrassed by the patently ludicrous award to him of the Nobel Peace Prize. And to be fair it did seem so when he accepted the honour (a term I use loosely) last Friday, quoting his daughter Malia as saying: “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” (call me a cynic but that’s a fabricated quote if ever I heard one).

Since then, however, it’s become abundantly clear that Obama isn’t even faintly sheepish about the award. Yeah, there’s all the usual guff about him being humbled, it’s about us not him blah blah blah. But this can’t mask the fact that he’s as pleased as punch about landing the prize. He’s lapping it up and seems to view it – sadly and mistakenly – as a major validation.

Apart from the clue that he’s going to skip over to Oslo to pick up the gong personally (great opportunity for a wonderful speech), consider the emails his White House is sending out. No opportunity to shoehorn in a mention of the Nobel prize is being missed.

Yesterday, it was: “Earlier today, President Obama spoke with President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, and President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia. In addition to thanking each for their respective calls regarding the Nobel Peace Prize, the President…”

The day before it was: “Late Saturday morning, President Obama returned Indian Prime Minister Singh’s phone call. Prime Minister Singh had called President Obama on Friday to congratulate him on having won the Nobel Peace Prize. The President expressed his appreciation for the call and congratulations. He noted that he was humbled and grateful for having received the Nobel, and that he saw it as a call to collective action on shared challenges.”

[…]

All in all, it’s a hilarious display of vanity and self-absorption masquerading ineptly as humility and selflessness.

But there’s a serious question: What does it say about Obama’s character when such an empty symbol means so much to him?

You didn’t really fall for all that humilty bullshit, didja?

This is the guy who:

Decided he was qualified to be president after only two years in the Senate

Wrote TWO memoirs by his mid-forties (and without having accomplished anything worthy of note)

Ran a campaign that was based on a cult of personality

Rented a stadium and built his own faux-temple just to give one speech.

Shall I go on?

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The Nobel Peace Prize

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Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) invented dynamite and other explosives. Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer and armaments manufacturer who made an enormous fortune selling explosives and heavy munitions (cannons and explosive projectiles.)  Concerned about his legacy, he decided to use his fortune for the betterment of humanity.

In his will he created five annual prizes: physical science, chemistry, medicine, literature and the Big Kahuna: Peace

From Wiki:

According to Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize should be awarded: “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

[…]

The Norwegian Parliament appoints the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects the Laureate for the Peace Prize. The Committee chairman, currently Thorbjørn Jagland, presents the Prize to the laureate at the award ceremony. At the time of Alfred Nobel’s death Sweden and Norway were in a personal union in which the Swedish government was solely responsible for foreign policy, and the Norwegian Parliament was responsible only for Norwegian domestic policy. Alfred Nobel never explained why he wanted a Norwegian rather than Swedish body to award the Peace Prize.[5] As a consequence, many people have speculated about Nobel’s intentions. For instance, Nobel may have wanted to prevent the manipulation of the selection process by foreign powers, and as Norway did not have any foreign policy, the Norwegian government could not be influenced.

[…]

The statutes of the Nobel Foundation specify categories of individuals who are eligible to make nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.[6] These are;

* Members of national assemblies and governments and members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union,
* Members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Court of Justice at the Hague,
* Members of Institut de Droit International,
* University professors of history, political science, philosophy, law and theology, university presidents and directors of peace research international affairs institutes,
* Former recipients, including board members of organisations that have previously won the prize,
* Present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and
* Former permanent advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

Nominations must usually be submitted to the Committee by February 1 of the year in question. Nominations by committee members can be submitted up to the date of the first Committee meeting after this deadline.

[…]

Nominations are considered by the Nobel Committee at a meeting where a short list of candidates for further review is created. This short list is then considered by permanant advisers to the Nobel institute, which consists Institute’s Director and Research Director and a small numbers of Norwegian academics with expertise in subject areas relating to the prize. Advisers usually have some months to complete reports, which are then considered by the Committee to select the laureate. The Committee seeks to achieve a unanimous decision, but this is not always possible.

Wiki also says that this year there were a record 205 nominations. That means the Barack Obama was considered more worthy than 204 other candidates.

The Nobel Peace Prize is supposed to be unaffected by politics or corruption.  It is supposed to go to:

“to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

This year’s award clearly violates the terms of Nobel’s will. According to the Citation the Committee selected Obama for his “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples” in his outreach to the Muslim world and efforts to end nuclear proliferation.”

From the New York Fishwrapper:

In Oslo, Thorbjørn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and a former prime minister of Norway, explained that Obama’s early international diplomacy efforts helped him beat out more than 200 other nominees to become the third sitting U.S. president to win the award. The sitting presidents to win the prize were Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919. Former President Jimmy Carter won the award in 2002.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” Jagland said. “We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future, but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.”

The problem is he hasn’t done anything except make some speeches. But we already knew that last year.

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