Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

[merle haggard]

Obama is presiding over 2 wars, neither of which he is stopping. how much has he cut military spending by? Well, between Kissinger, Gore and Obama I think the Nobel Peace prize has a bout the same credibility a a Blue Peter badge

wrong , you had to actually accomplish something to get a Blue Peter badge

Evo Morales was a much more worthy candidate for it . Hes the first indigenous Bolivian president to be elected despite a centuries old race bar against Indians . Hes dramatically increased Bolivian literacy levels , done wonders for the Bolivian Healthcare system - people actually seeing doctors for the first time in their lives - successfully implemented a human rights and social justice agenda , successfully upheld democracy and averted civil war and the break up of his own nation .

You cant give somebody a peace prize just for not being George Bush .

[East Coast Elitist]

Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Bono

Rebranding America

a few highlights:

There’s a sense in some quarters of these not-so-United States that Norway, Europe and the World haven’t a clue about the real President Obama; instead, they fixate on a fantasy version of the president, a projection of what they hope and wish he is, and what they wish America to be.

Well, I happen to be European, and I can project with the best of them. So here’s why I think the virtual Obama is the real Obama, and why I think the man might deserve the hype.

All right ... I don’t speak for the rest of the world. Sometimes I think I do — but as my bandmates will quickly (and loudly) point out, I don’t even speak for one small group of four musicians. But I will venture to say that in the farthest corners of the globe, the president’s words are more than a pop song people want to hear on the radio. They are lifelines.

[rhonda15]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaM94mieeLg&feature="]YouTube - Cornel West Sounds Off on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize[/ame]

"It's going to be hard to be a war president with a Peace Prize," he says.

[Fermoy]

"Cornel West Sounds Off on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize"

"It's going to be hard to be a war president with a Peace Prize," he says.

He will be in good (bad)company

War and Peace Prizes
by Howard Zinn

I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticised the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final peace agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war, with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, is given a peace prize!

People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

War and Peace Prizes | CommonDreams.org

[Oppenheimer]

So given the announcement is this Friday, and on last year's form for awarding it to someone nobody expected to win it, who would be a) the most likely to win it and b) why do you think Bono deserves it?

[CookieMonster]

So given the announcement is this Friday, and on last year's form for awarding it to someone nobody expected to win it, who would be a) the most likely to win it and b) why do you think Bono deserves it?

Jointly awarded to Guy Verhofstadt and Declan Ganley, for allowing Fianna Fail to ruin the country.