I quote:

[...]the candidates are God awful.  Seriously, they stink.  Just to review our choices:  Democrat Martha Coakley has a prosecutor’s complex that would make Javert seeem like a bleeding-heart liberal.  She is a God-awful politician so out of touch with  reality that she accused Red Sox hero extraordinaire Curt Schilling of being a Yankee fan (Schilling’s blog response is here).  Based on the ads I’ve seen, her campaign has also been, by far, the nastier of the two.

This leaves Republican Scott Brown, who based on this vacuous Boston Globe op-ed, is an empty shirt with no actual policy content whatsoever.  He was in favor of health care reform before he was against it.  He can’t stand the run-up in government debt, and wants to cut taxes across the board to take care of the problem — cause that makes perfect economic sense.   The one thing he is unequivocally for is waterboarding suspected terrorists.

It would be true political irony if all Obama’s blood sweat and tears over health reform should go to waste because of a mess like this. But that’s politics for you. Part of the reason why it’s so interesting…

But what is the moral of the story of Obama’s theory mixing? Logical inconsistency? No, that the real world is significantly more complex than what either of those theories portrays it as, and that any government drawing on just one way of analyzing the world has a much smaller toolbox to choose from when trying to understand what’s going on and what to do about it.

Just having an American president that has relaxed the hardcore neo-Conservative thinking of the White House seems to me to be important enough for world peace to justify a Nobel Peace Prize all on its own, regardless of the greatness of his future achievements.

None of what goes on in the evening has anything to do with government. The president and the Congress are discussed as omnipresent villains in a fairytale that begins with a happy kingdom of worthies, introduces an ogre, a witch, and a curse, and then interviews champions to come forward to rescue the frightened children and save the USA. All the while, Ming the Merciless, aka Rupert Murdoch, rakes up the ratings and the bucks.

The worst mistake Axelrod and Emanuel are making by confusing Fox News with the Republican Party is that they are confusing campaigning with entertaining and then letting this mistake blind them to the fact that the White House is for governing, not just staging.

Fox News is not in the news business; it’s in show business. The Republican Party, like its blood kin the Democratic Party, is in the campaign business. The White House is in the government business, though, from the evidence so far, it doesn’t know how to break out of the campaign business.

It all sounds rather logical to me. I’ve never been thought “taking on the media” was a particularly good idea. The winner in this struggle is surely Rupert Murdoch, who gets richer by the hour.

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is certainly an unexpected and interesting choice by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. On the one hand, awarding it to a person with a nine month history of involvement on the scene of international diplomacy may seem odd. On the other hand, awarding the prize based on work towards international diplomacy and multilateralism must be considered a return to the original intent expressed by Alfred Nobel in his will.

Some critics claim that awarding it to the man that advocated stepping up the military effort in Afghanistan is outrageous. Awarding the prize to someone who has shown himself willing to use military force is however nothing new. Theodore Roosevelt (1917), Henry Kissinger (1973) and Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) are examples of statesmen who aren’t remembered as always being soft when it came to the application of power.

More substantial is the criticism that Obama hasn’t actually achieved anything yet. He has been in office for 9 months. During this time he has taken many initiatives to promote multilateralism and change America’s position in the world, but he has yet to get any results. I can’t off the top of my head remember any laureate with so little to show for himself in terms of actual achievement. Still, the will of Alfred Nobel, the mandate of the prize, states that the Nobel Prizes should be given to: “…those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Who did more during the last 12 months than Barack Obama?

For the peace prize specifically, it shall according to the will go to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Once again, it serves as a good description of Obama’s agenda, promoting the UN, promoting mulitlateralism in general and working for nuclear disarmament.

The comittee has been under a lot of fire in recent years for overstepping these bounds by laureates such as Wangari Maathai (2004), Mohammad Yunnus and Grameen Bank (2006) and Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007). With last year’s prize to Matti Ahtisari and this year’s to Barack Obama they have certainly returned to “the roots” with prices for traditional peace work by Nobel’s own definitions.

Lastly, awarding the prize to an active world leader with future achievements to make rather than in retrospect for past achievements may help the prize further in contributing to making actual peace in the world. Giving the prize to the person in the world best positioned to make actual progress on the matter may put additional pressure on the American president to deliver on his promises.

All in all I’m surprised at the award, but pleasantly so.

(Hat tip to Pravda for finding this).