www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Seems to me it is about the same at Pres. Carter and Arafat receiving it.

I was listening to a program the other day from TV network, they were interviewing people as to 'whether they knew where Pres. Obama was getting all this money'. Basically they didn't know and really didn't care, it was just his 'stash'.

The way to control the population and the people is through the free health care. Who knows!

An interesting article on the subject from TIME no less. Archbishop Raya was nominated a few years back, look at his achievements. Do you suppose they even give him a nod? I doubt it.

Obama's Nobel: The Last Thing He Needs

The last thing Barack Obama needed at this moment in his presidency and our politics is a prize for a promise.

Inspirational words have brought him a long way - including to the night in Grant Park less than a year ago when he asked that we "join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand." (See pictures of Obama in Grant Park.)

By now there are surely more callouses on his lips than his hands. He, like every new president, has reckoned with both the power and the danger of words, dangers that are especially great for one who wields them as skillfully as he. A promise beautifully made raises hopes especially high: we will revive the economy while we rein in our spending; we will make health care simpler, safer, cheaper, fairer. We will rid the earth of its most lethal weapons. We will turn green and clean. We will all just get along. (See pictures of eight months of Obama's diplomacy.)

So when reality bites, it chomps down hard. The Nobel committee cited "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." His critics fault some of those efforts: those who favor a missile shield for Poland or a troop surge in Afghanistan or a harder line on Iran. But even his fans know that none of the dreams have yet come true, and a prize for even dreaming them can feed the illusion that they have. (See the Top 10 Obama Backlash Moments)

Maybe the prize will give him more power, new muscles to haul unruly nations in line. But peacemaking is more about ingenuity than inspiration, about reading other nations' selfish interests and cynically, strategically exploiting them for the common good. Will it help if fewer countries come to the table hating us? To a point. But it's a starting point, not an end in itself.

At this moment many Americans are longing for a president who is more bully, less pulpit. The president who leased his immense inaugural good will to the hungry appropriators writing the stimulus bill, who has not stopped negotiating health care reform except to say what is non-negotiable, whose solicitude for the wheelers and dealers who drove the financial system into a ditch leaves the rest of us wondering who has our back, has always shown great promise, said the right things, affirmed every time he opens his mouth that he understands the fears we face and the hopes we hold. But he presides over a capital whose day-to-day functioning has become part-travesty, part-tragedy, wasteful, blind, vain, petty, where even the best intentioned reformers measure their progress with teaspoons. There comes a time when a President needs to take a real risk - and putting his prestige on the line to win the Olympics for his home town does not remotely count.

Compare this to Greg Mortenson, nominated for the prize by some members of Congress, who the bookies gave 20-to-1 odds of winning. Son of a missionary, a former army Medic and mountaineer, he has made it his mission to build schools for girls in places where opium dealers and tribal warlords kill people for trying. His Central Asia Institute has built more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan - a mission which has, along the way, inspired millions of people to view the protection and education of girls as a key to peace and prosperity and progress.(See an interactive guide to Obama's first 100 days.)

Sometimes the words come first. Sometimes, it's better to let actions speak for themselves.

TIME [news.yahoo.com]

"are you suggesting that Mr. Obama is the antichrist? I hope that's not your intention."

To have no shift in the balance of the threat of mutual assured destruction and to disarm completely, all the world's nukes will have to be disarmed at once and all armed countries will have to be like-minded in accomplishing that goal.

If President Obama spearheaded that goal to its end I would be convinced of that possibility.

So far my opinion is that he's due to be overwhelmed with hard realities. I do not look forward to the tests our enemies are plotting.

Terry

You can see my essay on the subject at The Weekly Standard. [weeklystandard.com]

As the T-Shirt used to say, "Ban Nuclear Weapons: Make the World Safe for Conventional War".

A good essay. I don't hear much about boomers anymore.

Khrushchev sacrificed the maintenance and development of conventional arms for the sake of nuclear weapons. After successful tests, he inflated the number of h-bombs that were deployable. That illusion lasted long enough to be effective diplomacy. But I think he underestimated America's reaction.

I don't know what it will take for us to show strength again; what will it take to open the eyes of the many cynics who dismiss real threats, who say that 'we' are the biggest threat next to Israel.

Obama inspires hope in the hearts of our natural enemies and confusion in the hearts of our allies.

Terry

Terry,

Thanks. To be honest, I had not really thought about nuclear strategy for almost two decades, and I am a bit miffed that, thanks to Barack Obama, I have to think about it, again. I never thought I would see the day that anyone could make Bill Clinton's foreign policy team look like a bunch of Metternichs, but Obama has indeed done the trick.

"Not perfect" is a very huge understatement. The socialist forms of health care in those countries are not to be admired; they surely do not serve the populations of the countries that have them "pretty well". Despite high taxes those they are mostly broke and provide rather poor care, with rationing and euthanasia thrown in. We can see in the six states that have tried socialized medicine that is if failing big time. A good article was posted yesterday at this link. My opposition to socialism is that it just doesn't work. The evidence shows clearly that it enslaves rather then frees.

No. His ideas did not change the world. If one reads the official statement he appears to be congratulated for promising to abandon a standard of right and wrong, and for embracing moral relativism: "Quote: "[President Obama's] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population." Does one really need to note that the values and attitudes of the majority of the world's population - especially world governments - are pretty awful? Christians are still crucified in Sudan. Women in Muslim countries are executed for looking at a man the wrong way. Businessmen in Russia who oppose Putin disappear. Millions of babies are murdered yearly in China (both in the womb and after birth). America is far from being perfect (especially when it comes to murdering our own children) - but compared to most of the rest of the world we remain morally superior. American exceptionalism is due to our Constitution (founded ultimately on the Ten Commandments, but noting that our freedoms and rights come from God and not governments or world wide relative morals).

While you can certainly find those who want to conspire to create a one world government, I don't take such things too seriously. Governments are inept by nature, so such an attempt to form a one would government would probably fall apart before it was even formed.

Terry makes a good point. I'd say the giving of the peace prize to President Obama is partly a thumb of the nose at President Bush and encouragement to President Obama to go the way of the world. After all, America still stands strong against a lot of moral evil as the rest of the world embraces it (or at least embraces moral relativism).

Good article.

I would summarize it: He who carries the biggest stick can keep the dictators in order. He who throws away his big stick with the hope that others will do the same is a fool.

"I never thought I would see the day that anyone could make Bill Clinton's foreign policy team look like a bunch of Metternichs, but Obama has indeed done the trick."

Stuart,

And, for a related point, I never thought that there was a chance the dollar would have junk bond status in my lifetime.

I'm going to drop current events for the rest of the night and finish the first essay in Bertram Wolfe's "An Ideology in Power."

Terry

Allow me to explain a few things. America, by it's very nature, is, and has always been, a nation of rugged individualists, endowed with the constitutionally guaranteed right to the pursuit of happiness, whatever that may mean to each individual American. By relying on themselves, and maintaining this sense of individual freedom, America and the Americans have become the wealthiest, strongest and most emulated nation on Earth. To put it bluntly. a true American does not give a rodent's hindquarters what the "so-called" "enlightened" Europeans or other western peoples thinks about him or his country, as America, as evidenced by it's moral superiority as well as superiority in almost every other aspect, has surpassed all of "old Europe". The problem that any true American has with Mr Obama, or any other individual of his ilk, is their attempts to turn America into some weak-wristed caricature of Western Europe, replete with it's moral decay, military impotence and almost complete dependence on baby sitter type governments, all based on marxist ideology.

Look at Britain. A century ago, it was the mightiest nation on Earth. It's navy was feared and respected. What is Britain today, but a washed up has-been, living in the shadow of it's father's great deeds. The same can be said of every other country in old Europe. You are decaying remnants of the past, mired in taxation and enslaved to the nanny oversight of your Socialist governments. And once the Hagarenes swarming your nanny states are finished with you, you will be even less.

America does not want or need your approval. To us, it means even less than nothing. And frankly, most Americans are tired of saving you from two world wars of your own making, as well as a cold war, only to be derided as "cowboys".

As far as Mr Obama, Ms Pelosi and others of like ilk, maybe you would like to take them in as political refugees, because as soon as most Americans wake up and realize what these Socialists are trying to foist on America with their Nationalized Death Care, and capitulation to the Hagarenes, they will be run out of town. While Mr Bush had his faults, and surely was no Ronaldus Magnumus, this new breed of "leaders" are not worthy to kiss his shoelaces.

Alexandr, who is grateful to his adopted country for giving his family refuge from the bolsheviks.

Apparently Obama and most of the Democrats in congress want America to follow the once 'Great' Britain's path to world obscurity and moral decay! Norway has just made that all the more obvious by bestowing the Nobel "Peace" Prize on President Obama.

He who carries the biggest stick can keep the dictators in order. He who throws away his big stick with the hope that others will do the same is a fool.

Mega Ditto...

A fair point. And just to be clear, while not an American, I spent a great deal of my time there growing up, and would reject any blind anti-Americanism. There is a great deal that I love and admire about America, but of course also a great deal that I find distressing. Please take note of the language I used in my posts above. They express 'bewilderment' - even frustration, maybe; I hope they do not convey condemnation of America or Americans.


Wealth, strength, and being emulated can hardly be said to be measures of moral, or any other kind of superiority by necessity. I am surprised you would turn to such adjectives, when our own Scriptures would caution precisely against them.


Well, what can one say to that. I guess if Americans feel that way, then all dialogue is over. And I, once I have made this post, can cancel my account.

Of course, that would be to ignore all the evidence of America's moral failures (NOT saying for a moment that ALL Western countries haven't failed in some significant ways...), as well as, again, accepting your definition of 'superiority' even when it seems to represent something quite antithetical to manifold Gospel imperatives.


The countries of Europe, socialist? Yes. Marxist? Other than, possibly, France, not even close. I would be careful of bandying about philosophical definitions too loosely.


Don't even get me started on the collective psychological effects of colonialism. Britain is a state suffering from the self-inflicted wounds of having once been the power you describe. The problem today is not Britain's decline. Many an academic sociologist, theologian, or philosopher would argue that it is precisely because after enslaving its own children through the Industrial Revolution, it turned its attentions away from its problems at home to 'civilising' the rest of the world.


You're quite right about this. Any European that fails to remember America's sacrifice in two world wars is negligent and ignorant. At the same time, that doesn't mean that every time America has turned its head abroad, it has been in the right.

As for the Cold War, however, one can hardly argue that America saved Europe from it. Besides the fact that the development of the Cold War was a joint effort, the idea that somehow we were all saved from it by America is absurd.


I am not a Bush-hater, but I am a despiser of neo-Conservative ideology. The influence of Strauss on the Bush cabinet was is surely the greatest travesty of the contemporary world. Conservatives in the US should really come to terms with the history of Republicanism, and stop confusing the Bush regime's particular brand of conservatism with a healthy conservatism that, quite rightly, looks to America's great sources and seeks to build a strong and good republic.


Iakiv (whose anti-Bolshevik credentials are as solid as anyone's, having grown up on the American side of the Atlantic because his grandfather was brave enough and smart enough to have recognised tyranny immediately before it wiped out up to ten million Ukrainians)