10.09
With the completely out of thin-air news today that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for… absolutely no reason. It’s worth putting the absurdity of the peace prize itself into some context. Two of the most absurd episodes in the history of the peace prize were Teddy Roosevelt and Al Gore. T-Rex won it in 1906 and Gore won in 2007. I’m leaving out people like Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat because of the incendiary nature of the Isreali/Palestinian thing. They were absurd too, but I don’t want to go there.
Teddy Roosevelt was the biggest warmongering buffoon of a president we’ve ever had. He won the peace prize for presiding over the slaughter of 200,000 Philippino’s during the Phillipine-American war in 1902. That was so peaceful. Here’s Tom Woods excellent research on the matter:
Roosevelt’s fascination with war is corroborated both by his own testimony and by that of those who knew him. A college friend wrote in 1885, “He would like above all things to go to war with some one. . . . He wants to be killing something all the time.” [33] Roosevelt told another friend a few years later:
“Frankly I don’t know that I should be sorry to see a bit of a spar with Germany. The burning of New York and a few other sea coast cities would be a good object lesson in the need of an adequate system of coast defenses, and I think it would have a good effect on our large German population to force them to an ostentatiously patriotic display of anger against Germany.” [34]
Over and over again Roosevelt insisted that the country “needed” a war. “He gushes over war,” wrote the philosopher William James,
“as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life. . . . One foe is as good as another, for aught he tells us.” [35]
One of the top scholars of Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy has explained that the Rough Rider “sought a big navy because it would prevent war, but also because it was such fun to have a big navy.”
Sounds like a great candidate for a peace prize, no? But the even better one is Al Gore. He won his prize for making a movie about global warming. That is so peaceful. It’s a good thing he won, because the person he beat out was totally unworthy. All she did is rescue 2500 Polish children from concentration camps:
In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers’ underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler.
During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.
Felt said that Sendler had begun her rescue operation before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. “We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota,” Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews.
Irena Sendler was reportedly a candidate to receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, but that honor was not awarded to her.
Yep. Instead it went to good ol’ Al Gore for all his work with Clinton in bombing Bosnia back to the stone age. The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. I didn’t even mention Woodrow Wilson who won it two years after getting the U.S. into WWI.
