G’danged Norwegians
This has become a surreal presidency. Obama supporters of the qualified and caveat-filled type will just have to fend off against an outsized cariacture, selling the steak not the sizzle. But the lesson of the moment is Norway: More anti-Bush than you.
I find it notable that the Huffingtonposts’s “most viewed” list seems to have moved off from what has historically been its top view getters — item #5 is Hilary Swank Sleeps Naked, Stays Naked In Front Of, and in the past the site has buttressed its hits with – as an example, July 4th weekend’s most viewed was a slideshow of “Top Flag Bikini Moments”.   Or maybe the Obama Nobel Peace Prize has trumped the celebrity / sex matrix. Wait to see what we get next week. At the moment, the most popular page at huffingtonpost is “8 Most Outrageous Attacks on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize”. Rush Limbaugh pops up twice, unremarkably. Glenn Beck’s recommendation for the Tea Party Movement gets a mention. Perhaps John Bolton said something untorrid, but huffingtonpost didn’t bother to place it here — glomming straight to the relatively sensible and defendable decree that he should “turn it down”.
This leaves me hanging at William Kristol. Kristol points out that after Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize, he was chunkered out of office.
Woo Hoo!
Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. A year later, he was out of power and the Soviet Union had dissolved.
Who knows… maybe things can unravel in the United States in just that matter that they unravelled in the Soviet Union? Are we travaising back to Igor Panin’s chilling vision of a United States eaten up by Outer Empires, or John L Perry’s vision of a Military Coup the type of which supported by Jim DeMint for at least Honduras?
I don’t mean to compare Barack Obama to Gorbachev, who was, whatever his faults, a truly historic and courageous figure.
Sure he doesn’t.
But let’s hope the parallel extends this far: that a year from now the Democrats suffer a major electoral repudiation, and that the New Liberalism goes the way of Reform Communism. And that, beginning in 2013, Obama will have lots of free time to spend hobnobbing with Gorbachev on the international celebrity circuit.
To further run with this analogy, the new Yeltsin would have to be a figure that — at the very least promises — to accelerate further those at one time looking like they were revolutionary but now seems kind of piddling reforms alongside that “New Liberalism” / “Reform Communism” route of the Gorbachev / Obama figure. And you know what this makes Bush in this equation? The Old Communist Apparatchiks.
Fascinating.
In other news, the anti-Wilsonites have slid into view, and a few items from their litany of Wilson abuses need to be sorted out. Woodrow Wilson was not the author of the Treaty of Versailes, and his vision with the League of Nations was severely compromised. It is interesting to note that the great gap of dearth of winners between 1914 and 1918 which preceed Wilson’s victory — with that clever Red Cross disrupting those war years. Another great gap followed for 1939 through 1943 — where the Norwegians apparently didn’t even muster the heart to find a Red Cross.
Theodore Roosevelt is another matter. His brand of Jingoism “War is the Health of the State”  kind of jars here. But, as head of a major world power he stood there, ready “for his successful mediation to end the Russo-Japanese war and for his interest in arbitration, having provided the Hague arbitration court with its very first case“.
With the sort of flickering Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the more mainstream Jimmy Carter and Al Gore (not terribly controversial choices outside the United States, with some kibatching about strenuous connections for Gore), why oh why isn’t anyone going after Vice President Charles Dawes’s Nobel Peace Prize?
I can do William Kristol one better, though. Statistically, the receiving of a Nobel Peace Prize for currently residing political leaders, raises… well, Rabin and Sadat and — well, there’s also MLK.
 Then again, one step further than this — we have further evidence for those that believe this sort of thing that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ of the Book of Revelations.