As I said in my inaugural Fish & Bicycles post, the limiting narrowness of writing almost exclusively about politics is what led to me to pull the plug on my previous blog. Fish & Bicycles, then, represents a promise to myself and any readers I might be fortunate enough to attract that I will avoid at all cost narrowing once again in this way.
That said, there will be occasions, there will be political current events that are noteworthy, worthy of my commentary, or simply impossible to ignore.
This is one of those events.
US President Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Committee said he won it for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
Wow.
Naturally, Republicans are all in a dither, saying that Obama has not accomplished enough to earn this honor.
And, if the Nobel Peace Prize was indeed historically awarded based solely on unequaled actual accomplishments in peacemaking, then I might be questioning this decision myself. Fortunately, historians have kept records on this kind of thing, and there is precedence for the award going to someone or some group that has made overtures or other symbolic gestures towards peacemaking that were remarkable accomplishments given the context.
There is perhaps no better example than the 1994 award to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin. No lasting peace came out the efforts of those three men, and Arafat was considered to be a terrorist by millions across the globe, but the light of hope they shed in the darkness of the deadly Israel-Palestine conflict, as fleeting as it lasted, was a very powerful thing, a redeeming thing, and the Nobel committee felt it was award-worthy.
Context is important, and one could easily explain the Republican response to Obama’s Nobel as their collective denial of the context — a national and international disgrace mainly of their own making — for this award.
Yes, the George W. Bush era was THAT bad.
Josh Marshall nailed it this morning:
This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.
Update: The DNC, with uncharacteristic righteous indignation, reacts to the Republican response to Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize:
“The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize,” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told POLITICO. “Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize – an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride – unless of course you are the Republican Party.
“The 2009 version of the Republican Party has no boundaries, has no shame and has proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn. It’s no wonder only 20 percent of Americans admit to being Republicans anymore – it’s an embarrassing label to claim,” Woodhouse said.
BRAVO!!!
Later Update: From TPM:
A State Department spokesperson, commenting on the Obama’s Nobel:
Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum — when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.
