Friday, October 12, 2007

A worthy recipient

Why the heck shouldn't Al Gore have the Nobel Peace Prize? After all, previous honorees have included such moral exemplars as Yasir Arafat, Le Duc Tho, Rigoberta Menchu and Jimmy Carter. In such company, Gore fits in quite nicely.

There's long been a fundamental difference between the Nobel Peace Prize and the other awards annually given out by the Norwegians. To earn a Nobel in chemistry, or economics, or many of the other categories, you actually have to accomplish something. Let's consider the examples of previous Peace Prize winners. Arafat was an unapologetic terrorist responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, generally in bloodthirsty and remorseless ways. Tho was a representative of a North Vietnamese regime that has the blood of millions on its hands. Menchu is an ineffectual Guatemalan politico whose life story is largely fabricated. Carter is merely the most ineffectual president in modern times. Why not add a pseudo-scientific charlatan to the mix?

At bottom, the Nobel Peace Prize is about confirming the conventional wisdom of leftists. It is useful only as a gauge for measuring the latest obsessions of the bien pensants of the West. Let Al have it - now if the Vatican starts positing Gore for beatification, then I'll get angry.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hear that next year Kim Jong from North Korea has an inside track on the prize. After all, he's giving up his nukes...What a joke...Nobel is rolling in his grave. In truth, Gore could really be used as a tool for peace: He could speak in front of a riotous crowd and bore them all to sleep. I've also heard that the man who invented the internet has another distinction pending: His picture is going to be listed in the dictionary after the word Hypocrite.