Obama's Class Despite Nobel Peace Committee Groupie-fication

Real life is stranger than fiction. You couldn't make up a better parody than the Nobel Peace Prize committee did in awarding President Barack Obama its 2009 award for, in Saturday Night Live parlance, "doing nothing".

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."
[emphasis added]

Who knew that was all it takes to get the Nobel Peace prize? You don't have to do anything--just say the right words. There are going to be a lot more qualified Nobel peace prize candidates in the future.

Poor President Obama. What do you do when supposedly serious people become groupies and do embarrassing things?*

President Obama has hit just the right tone. He eluded denigrating the five member Nobel committee while reiterating that he hasn't done anything concrete to deserve the award.

In a brief statement in the White House Rose Garden on Friday, the president said he does not "view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments," but rather as a recognition of goals he has set for the United States and the world.

"I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize," he said.

Pretty classy.
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*the Nobel Peace Prize committee:

- Thorbjørn Jagland (Chairman) - President of the Storting, former Labor Prime Minister, vice president of the Socialist Inrternational, named by the KGB as a ”confidential contact”.
- Kaci Kullmann Five - public affairs advisor and former Conservative politican.
- Sissel Rønbeck - former minister of Left-wing Labour Party.
- Inger-Marie Ytterhorn - political adviser to the centre-Right Progress Party
- Ågot Valle - Socialist Left member of Parliament.

UPDATE: Rob Tornoe has a collection of editorial cartoons posted here.