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Many of our favorites have columns and posts on the peace prize.
Claudia Rosett is brilliant.
So, beyond the Nobel Prize, what is it that Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, the United Nations, Mohamed El Baradei and Al Gore all have in common?
The flip answer is that they have all in their time pushed out enough hot air to melt the polar ice caps on Mars, and if anyone thinks that’s an exaggeration about Mars, check out this 2003 report from NASA. (Yes, it seems that even on a planet where homo sapiens has never exhaled at all, let alone fired up an SUV or hopped a longhaul airline flight, ice caps can suffer a volatile existence).
More seriously, here on planet earth, what those on the list above all have in common is that they have all in pursuit of their own ambitions pushed agendas that corrode the real basis for building a better life for all on this planet — which, in a nutshell, is freedom.
Free societies may produce more CO2 (whatever that actually adds up to — or not — in the context of a world climate that was changing long before we got here, and will go on changing long after we are gone). But that’s because they also produce more, per capita, of just about everything good — including ideas, inventions, contraptions and once-undreamt-of ways not only of sustaining human life, but of making it healthier, longer, easier and better. That happens when individuals have the liberty to make their own choices and tradeoffs.
That is not the world envisioned by the list of Nobel laureates above. …
When did the Nobel Peace Prize go off the tracks? Today’s award to Al Gore and the IPCC “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years …
Jim Taranto comments.
… Gore became only the second former U.S. vice president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The first was Theodore Roosevelt, 101 years ago. (A sitting veep, Charles Dawes, also won in 1926.) A comparison between Roosevelt’s prize and Gore’s shows how far the Nobel Peace Prize has strayed from its original purpose: Roosevelt won the prize for negotiating a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. Gore won it for something that has nothing to do with peace. …
… Who else could have won the Nobel prize, if the committee wanted to promote peace and freedom rather than political allies? Well, perhaps they may have considered the hundreds, if not thousands of monks in Burma who just sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of non-violent regime change. One or more of the people involved in the six-nation talks that has avoided war over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programs would have also seemed a more germane choice.
Those choices would have actually focused on real efforts to bring peace and freedom to millions of people. That’s what I thought the Nobel Peace Prize meant to honor. Instead, they chose to honor a hysteric with a polemic on meteorology. And why? Do you suppose the Nobel committee wants Al Gore to try a different job in the near future, and hopes to boost his chances to get it?
Club for Growth with Milton Freidman quote.
Quotes you’ll love in a Michael Ledeen Corner post.
WSJ editors note Ohio teachers’ unions quietly working to kill charter schools.
The concept of charter schools is popular enough that even most liberals won’t attack them openly. Yet the national political assault continues behind-the-scenes, most recently in Ohio, where unions have now been caught giving orders to Attorney General Marc Dann, who has duly saluted.
Last week the Columbus Dispatch published emails showing that Mr. Dann and the Ohio Education Association are in cahoots to close down certain charter schools in the state. Mr. Dann was elected last November in a Democratic sweep that included Governor Ted Strickland and was helped by Big Labor. As a token of his appreciation, Mr. Strickland earlier this year proposed placing a moratorium on new charter schools and restrictions on private-school vouchers, only to be rebuffed by the Legislature. Now it’s Mr. Dann’s turn to send a thank-you. …
Charles Krauthammer thinks of Hillary.
… The Post correctly called Hillary’s retreat from free trade ” opportunism under pressure,” the pressure being the rampant and popular protectionism of her presidential rivals, particularly in protectionist Iowa. But while “opportunism under pressure” suggests ( pace Hemingway) cowardice, the better description of Clintonism is slipperiness. Adaptability. Cynicism, if you like.
Note her clever use of terms. Reassessing NAFTA sounds great to protectionists, but it is perfectly ambiguous. It could mean abolition or radical curtailment. It could also mean establishing a study commission whose recommendations might not reach President Hillary Clinton’s desk until too late in her second term.
The Post editorial noted “a perverse kind of good news” in Hillary’s free-trade revisionism: “There’s little chance that her position reflects any deeply held principle.” And there lies the beauty not just of Clinton on free trade but of the Clinton candidacy itself: She has no principles. Her liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs.
I could never vote for her, but I (and others of my ideological ilk) could live with her — precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband’s — flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated — always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e., self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason. …
Power Line posts on the Dems’ spokesboy.
The infantilization of American politics is nearly complete. Exhibit A is the Democrats’ use of a 12 year-old to give the party’s radio address. Exhibit B is much of what E.J. Dionne writes.
These exhibits come together in Dionne’s latest column. It’s called “Meanies and Hypocrites,” which could be the title of roughly 80 percent of his columns. The meanies and hypocrites are always Republicans and conservatives who disagree with Dionne’s views. Today, they are conservatives bloggers, including the Power Line crew.
We stand accused of “assaulting” the family of the 12 year-old boy the Dems selected to give their radio address. The boy is Graeme Frost, who urged President Bush not to veto the expansion of the SCHIP program, which subsidizes health care to children in low income families. …
Carpe Diem with a post Mikey Moore should note – cancer survival rates tops in US.
National Review editors against ethanol.
It’s a depressing ritual. Every four years, as Iowans prepare to cast the first votes in the presidential-primary season, candidates descend on the corn-covered state and discover the miraculous properties of ethanol. The latest convert is Fred Thompson, who voted against ethanol subsidies when he was a U.S. senator but now says that ethanol is “a matter . . . of national security.†What he means is that he supports increasing federal assistance for ethanol production, on the grounds that this will reduce American dependence on oil from the Middle East. But, like most arguments for ethanol subsidies, this one is spurious. …
VDH Corner post on Carter.
The inconsideration of Jimmy Carter never ceases to amaze. Apparently, he is convinced that his Christian piety provides a pass for an ungenerous disposition, that comes across as self-centered and -absorbed—whether campaigning for a Nobel Prize by publicly attacking his president at a time of war, or smearing democratic Israel, or snide comments about his successors. But that being said, I’m surprised at his latest quip: …
Marty Peretz says, “What another Carter book?”
Clearly Jimmy Carter writes more books than he reads.