Back in the States, the reaction of many political pundits to our President’s Nobel Peace Prize has been anything but congratulatory. Conservative talk show demagogues even went so far as to make comments that if uttered by a liberal or Democrat would have been considered downright unpatriotic.
Leading the way was who else but the Republican Party’s right-wing ‘King of Bombast’, Rush Limbaugh. While discussing the President on his radio show, he told his audience: “Something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about, and that is he doesn’t deserve the award.” By ‘we’ I’m guessing Limbaugh was referring to his ‘ditto head’ listeners, who have of course never heard Limbaugh say anything that they didn’t agree with wholeheartedly.
Limbaugh then went on to tell Newsweek magazine that “the Nobel gang just suicide-bombed themselves”. While I’m not exactly sure the analogy makes sense, considering the source and his audience, I guess it doesn’t have to.
Nor was ‘Rushbo’ alone in his thinking. Another conservative heartthrob, Fox News’ Glenn Beck, claimed President Obama’s accolade was due to a powerful conspiracy of global progressive (read: left-wing) interest groups. While believing Obama’s Nobel Prize was the result of a global conspiracy might be a bit of a stretch, Beck’s suggestion that the organisers of this year’s anti-tax “tea parties” was the most deserving choice for the Nobel Peace Prize simply defies all logic.
Another conservative extremist took a different tack, focusing more on attacking the award itself rather than its recipient. Andrew McCarthy is a former Assistant United States Attorney for New York who now writes for the National Review, and has repeatedly attacked President Obama as a left-wing radical, as well as defended ‘waterboarding’ as a legitimate interrogation technique.
McCarthy claims that the Nobel Peace Prize had become “damaged goods” ever since it was awarded to Yasser Arafat in 1994. Funny, but as I recall, the 1994 Nobel was given to three men – Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – in recognition of the Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement. Then again, maybe if I had a law degree I could understand McCarthy’s twisted logic.
Last, but certainly not least, Conservative political ideologue Bill Kristol saw an analogue between President Obama’s Peace Prize and the prize that was given to Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Kristol claims that since Gorbachev resigned as the President of the Soviet Union (the day before it was officially dissolved) just over a year after he had been awarded the Nobel, that means President Obama will lose when he runs for a second term as US president in 2012. I guess I’m just not smart enough yet, but I don’t exactly see the parallel here.
At the very least, though, the Nobel committee has succeeded in finding a way to help America’s right-wingers overcome their paranoid hatred of all things Muslim. Rush Limbaugh’s ‘dittoheads’ and other American right-wingers have finally found some common ground with Muslim extremists and al-Qaeda terrorists – they all hate President Obama, and are afraid he might some day succeed. Wow! Partisan politics sure does make for some strange bedfellows, doesn’t it?
But what really concerns and disappoints me is the fact that partisan political conservatives were by no means the only members of the political news media in America questioning the Nobel panel’s decision…
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in International Relations and lectures on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU
