MSNBC's Buchanan calls Obama's Nobel Peace Prize "The Affirmative Action Nobel"
October 13, 2009 2:47 pm ET by Media Matters staff
From Buchanan's October 13 syndicated column:
The Affirmative Action Nobel
All my life, said Voltaire, I have had but one prayer: "O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous. And God granted it."
In awarding the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama, the Nobel committee has just made itself look ridiculous.
Consider. Though they had lead roles in ending a Cold War lasting half a century, between a nuclear-armed Soviet Empire and the West, neither Ronald Reagan nor John Paul II ever got a Nobel Prize.
In 1987, Reagan negotiated the greatest arms reduction treaty in modern time, the INF agreement removing all Soviet SS-20s and all U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles from Europe.
Other than hosting the "Beer Summit" between Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, what has Obama done to compare with what these statesmen did to make ours a more peaceful and better world?
What has Obama accomplished to compare with what the other sitting presidents to receive the Nobel Prize accomplished?
[...]
As for Obama, he got the award because he is the quintessential anti-Bush. Yet, the Nobel committee did him no service.
They have brazenly meddled in the internal affairs of the United States. They have reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes -- Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions -- he did not earn. They have put him under moral pressure to mollify a pacifist left. They have brought him to the point, dangerous in politics, where a man becomes the butt of reflexive jokes, as did Bill Clinton in the Monica affair.
These Norwegian groupies, acting out of "adolescent adulation," writes the Financial Times, have exposed themselves as "an annex to the left wing of the U.S. Democratic Party" with a "deeply misguided act" that will "embarrass (Obama's) allies and egg on his detractors."
The committee did something else. They ensured that their Nobel Peace Prize will never be taken as seriously again as once it was.
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All of these "impressions" are manufactured by the Right. All of these things were earned - not some affirmative action gifts, as Buchanan would have people believe.
Just more nonsense from the Right.
In a rare public defense of a process normally shrouded in secrecy, four of the Nobel jury's five judges spoke out Tuesday about a selection they said was both merited and unanimous.
To those who say a Nobel is too much too soon in Obama's young presidency, "We simply disagree ... He got the prize for what he has done," committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland told The Associated Press.
Jagland singled out Obama's efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe.
"All these things have contributed to — I wouldn't say a safer world — but a world with less tension," he said.
Jagland said that was never an issue for the Nobel committee, which followed the guidelines set forth by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who established the prize in his 1895 will.
"Alfred Nobel wrote that the prize should go to the person who has contributed most to the development of peace in the previous year," Jagland said.
"Who has done more for that than Barack Obama?"
You know........arms to Iran....hostages, latin american death squads, etc.
It has since been rewritten several times, of course!
They have reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes -- Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions -- he did not earn.
The Nobel Peace Prize, fair enough, but the Ivy League, the editorship and the convention? How did he not deserve any of these things?
Does anyone else see the real meaning of Buchanan including that quote?
He believes Obama is his enemy, and that Obama looks ridiculous for winning the Peace Prize.
He's not really referring to the Nobel Committee as his enemy. He's talking about Obama.
Maybe Obama's award was a surprise, maybe it was premature, maybe it was more for the hope of things to come rather than for solid accomplishment... I won't argue strenuously with that. But until you name someone else (and I don't mean a sour grapes entreaty about Reagan, for goodness sakes) and explain why he or she would have been a better choice, your complaints add up to nothing.
But saying you think President Obama receive the Nobel Peace Prize because he's black is racist as all get-out. And when someone like Onkel Pat, as other have done, invokes affirmative action out of nowhere, what other conclusion is there to draw?