...or does irony really go well with herring?

We all need to stop picking on the Norwegians. Their choice of the sainted Barack Obama (may his burgers always arrive medium rare) may contain more wisdom than was originally believed. After all, they almost never get to honor anyone that anyone ever heard of. They award prizes in Physics, Medicine, Chemistry (actually the President should have nailed that one, too) and Economics to a deserving but largely anonymous group of academics. Even the Literature prize invariably goes to some third world scribbler who sells fewer books in a career than Dan Brown does at lunch on a Tuesday in Spokane. Seriously, in the last fifty years the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to exactly six people you ever heard of: John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre (he was too depressed to accept), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Harold Pinter. Maybe Samuel Beckett. Other notables include Nadine Gordimer, Orthan Pamuk and Naguib Mahfouz. Really? The entire list reads like the 1934 graduating class from Ellis Island.


Who can blame the electors in Stockholm for choosing a famous person for the Peace Prize? How else will Thorbjorn Jagland, Chairman of the Nobel Committee ever get Fox News to mispronounce his name? Face it, you're not going to appear on the front page of The New York Times (above the fold) for naming Rigoberta Menchu Tum, winner in 1992, to anything except his work on stomach acid.



Everyone knows that the Nobel Prize was named, and paid for, by Alfred Nobel the inventor of dynamite. That's akin to naming a congeniality award for Dick Cheney. In the true spirit of Mr. Nobel, the electors of the Prize decided to blow something up, namely the collective craniums of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and the entire editorial staff at The Wall Street Journal. Norway hasn't made that much noise since Knute Rockne showed Notre Dame how to fling a football.

Naturally, in the spirit of Cub fans who disdainfully reject home run souvenirs hit by opposing clubs, the wingnuts of the conservative right have virtually insisted that President Obama reject the Prize. William Kristol, linchpin writer for the Weekly Standard has affirmed that, because the President hasn't produced anything of value, he is unworthy of acclaim. Mr. Kristol may wish to remember his own words in the unlikely event that the Pulitzer committee comes calling.

Others, like Michelle Malkin of Fox News, suggest the $1.5 million-ish monetary prize that accompanies the Nobel medal be donated to the families of servicemen killed in the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars. How fitting that the network at the forefront of American aggression in the world also comfortably participates in the distribution of donations to those who have suffered most as a result of their bellicose rhetoric. No doubt Ms. Malkin will remember this expression of generosity the next time she receives a check for one of her speaking engagements.

Forgotten in all of the furor over The Obama Award is the one man with a genuine axe to grind: Bill Clinton. The man who brokered the Good Friday Accords in Ireland and worked tirelessly to bring peace to the Middle East (including sitting for days next to the soap-and-toothpaste-averse Yasser Arafat) has once again been passed over. Mr. Clinton has a case. Like Al Gore(2007), Jimmy Carter (2002) and Barack Obama, he too is "not George W. Bush". He can justifiably point to the fact that the Nobel Committee has kissed every Democratic ass short of Chuck Shumer in the last fifteen years. In 1994 the Nobel Committee honored everybody involved in the Middle East peace talks except the guy who catered the dinner. Still, no Bill Clinton.

Sadly,Bill may be doomed to share the historical shadows with Mohandas K. Gandhi, Pope John Paul II and Eleanor Roosevelt, all of whom were passed over by the Norwegians. (Gandhi was nominated five times. Apparently the Norwegians were concerned about the fashion issues involved with white tie and loin cloth.) President Clinton will have to draw solace from the knowledge that, with or without a Nobel Peace Prize, he still isn't George W. Bush. Thank heaven for small blessings.