Obama Gets the Peace Prize? It's the Contrast.

Nobel Peace Prize Medal

Obama won the honor the same way he won the presidency.

Hard work, intelligence, respect for people, sanity.  It was such a contrast with what we had seen at the head of the world's superpower for so long, it floored everyone.

Like you I puzzled for a few hours on the reason the Nobel committee chose President Obama for the Peace Prize.  Certainly the first year of a presidency is unusual for awarding the esteemed prize.   I learned about it last night as I was about to exit my Twitter ap, which led to less sleep than I was trying to get.  But I did sleep on it as part of the process of absorbing it.

That works pretty well.  I woke up, and, in the course of  making coffee was thinking about how batshit his opponents were going to go, started thinking of the contrast between the president and our home-grown opposition.  

What a contrast between them and the president, but also, what does a Norwegian prize committee care about that?

Still look around the world.  In many important places we are also seeing a lot of crazy.  

In Iran and Israel for example, we see crazies on both sides of one of the most important issues of our day, but in fact, few leaders seem to be what leaders have been in the past, or at least what they were portrayed to be.  And more and more of them seem willing to play "the crazy" card.   Having one leader in the world willing to act crazy to get concessions is a problem, but more seem to be cropping up.  What can you do with them but make deals when they have the ability to possibly kill thousands outside their borders or kill millions of their own people.  

Even worse was suffering through 8 years of having a crazy administration in charge in the strongest nation on the globe, one in which the president is called "the leader of the free world.  That leader and his administration left our nation much weaker, but they left, taking their raving crowd out of the White House to scream and insult from the fringes.

And in came Obama and his team.   

Obama, is the one who could boost polls on health care reform with one speech, who seems to have a rational answer to just about everything, maybe because he spends a lot of time thinking and talking to staff who are also spending time thinking, instead of watching TV, or showing off in front of a base that rattles their jewelry for applause.

If the fat cats and business, allied with the crazy opposition, and supposed allies that imagine scenarios where Obama equals the extension of the neocons' programs, are not so powerful they can trump reason and sanity, maybe our nation -- and more importantly to the folks in Oslo -- the world, can find the path back to normality.

Correction:  Replaced Stockholm in last paragraph above with Oslo as I got hints that the Peace Prize in not awarded in Stockholm, Sweden like the other Nobel prizes, and verified the appropriate location.I also replaced "Swedish prize committee" with "Norwegian prize committee"

Update:  Politico has the words of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.  They seem to confirm what I thought as explained above.  See "Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize".

I think the Nobel committee chose on the basis of that hope, and on the the contrast with all that is not Obama.

Lets hope it helps.

tags: nobel peace prize  obama  stockholm  sweden  republicans  crazies  fat cats  intelligence  

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