Ig-Nobel Peace Prize: the death of a great idea

Today it finally hit me:

Whilst the Nobel Prizes in medicine and other fields, are honorable and generally deserved, the Nobel Peace Prize itself, being actually administered by an entirely different body of judges -- a handful of secret folk from one little country in Europe on Planet Earth -- no longer means anything.

It now bears all the grandeur for thinking folk of an award from MoveOn.org, PETA, the NRA, the Moral Majority or a committee of delinquent kids in your local middle school. It is purely and completely in the hands of determined leftists, a sham, a mockery of the grand idea that it once was. As such, without some attempt to broaden the judging pool, it no longer deserves respect.

I began to understand this when Jimmy Carter won the last time and it was made quite clear that he received the award as a poke in the eye of the-then president of the U.S.

I don't like Jimmy Carter. I hate his politics, his disaster of a presidency and his recent generalizations. BUT, even so, I can recognize that he is a hard-working man who has labored for decades in the cause of peace. I could understand the case for Carter getting the Award.

But Obama?

Has Obama ever confronted a dictator? No, he shakes their hands.

Has he ever promoted democracy? No,he is doing his best to ensure that it dies in Honduras.

Where was he three years ago? In a gulag? Under house arrest in Burma? Confronting the People's Liberation Army in China? Hardly.

Maybe Obama will eventually do wonderful things in the world. But even some of his strongest supporters concede that this designation was a little too early given.