Of course, some people assume we've been living a satire (see also the pseudonymous David Kahane, but mind that he's a Hollywood writer, hence neither subtle nor concise). I'm sure a lot of people saw the headlines Friday morning and wondered if they hadn't got up on the wrong side of the looking glass.
I pointed out a few days ago the DNC press release starting "The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists"*, producing a combination of offensiveness and stupidity that some of us refer to as a "Michael Moore." Moe Lane notes that several prominent bloggers of the left are also siding with the terrorists. As is Saturday Night Live, though Ann Althouse notes that their mockery, while well-placed, has not been well-done.
If you're looking for well-placed and well-done snark, you are — as is so often the case — well-advised to read Mark Steyn. If you want to support the cause of nominating Obama for a Heisman Trophy, Byron York can tell you how. If you just want to see some other examples of the Nobel Peace Committee's greatest hits, Powerline has you covered.
Tom Friedman rounds up some good suggestions for Obama while noting that he was chosen for the award, in large part, because he's not the sort to accept those suggestions. I particularly like his own idea, that David Petraeus be sent to accept the prize on his behalf. But that's unlikely to happen.
* Incidentally, I've seen a few bumper stickers and blog comments snarkily concluding "or the terrorists win", but that press release is the first serious attempt to use terrorism as a cudgel in that way since about 2003. I had thought of the jokes as gauchely dated, but apparently not.
Saturday, October 10, 2009 :::
I'll echo my brother's point that, while the Nobel Peace Prize committee has beclowned itself, Obama has not done so, at least in this instance. His party has, though:
"The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists - the Taliban and Hamas this morning - in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize," DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told POLITICO.
I've also recently read that nominations for the prize were due on February 1. Just in case the prize didn't seem, at best, a little premature, the nomination was even more ludicrous.
I don't think my brother has directly contradicted any of this, but I want to stand by my assertion that, while the Nobel Peace Prize committee has its share of comic gestures in the past, this is more hilarious than most. Consider how your response to the headline that Obama won differed from what it would have been if Clinton had won; insofar as the committee occasionally fails to make an ass of itself, you might have retained high enough expectations for the prize to have rolled your eyes, inferred a strong political bias, and expected a rather tenuous explanation of why s/he — either Clinton, though I suppose Bill would have been more supportable — was selected. You would have expected them to find something, though; Obama is comic because, unlike Arafat, there's not even a really bad argument for him to receive it. This is what is, I would argue, qualitatively different about this one; having long ago transcended such bourgeois notions as "merit", they have finally transcended its last vestigial remnant, that of "justification", and, after getting closer and closer with each incarnation, any pretense of objective value to the award has finally achieved its long-sought extinction of the self.
But the truly comic part is, of course, that it was Obama. And here let me take a brief tangent to respond to a comment I heard about how Obama can "redeem" himself for this: this certainly isn't his fault, and I don't think any less of him for it. In fact, near as I noted his response, it seemed the obligatory one; short of marching the committee to the sea and forbidding the tide to come in, which isn't the least bit Obama's style, the only reasonable response was gracious acceptance. It's simply rude, even for the Nobel Peace Prize, to give an official response on receiving it of "What the f***?" Even if that's everyone else's unofficial response. Since there's no substance to the prize, there's no room for substance to the response, but that's all to Obama's strengths, anyway.
But of course that the excessive humility "isn't the least bit Obama's style" is part of what's comic. This is like Peter Sellers in "Being There"; this is the escalation beyond incredible escalation of the cult surrounding Obama. The arc of the Nobel Peace Prize has been intercepted by the arc of Obama, each at the zenith of its trajectory.
Incidentally, in re flashes in the pan, it's worth noting that the way Nobel described the prizes was not as lifetime achievement awards, but as awards for accomplishments in the previous year. Bednorz and Muller won the physics prize in 1987 for work done in 1986, but in practice the science Nobels have generally followed the lifetime-achievement model for all but maybe the first couple years of their history.
