Are we having fun yet on the Right?
I keep seeing comments around the blogosphere in which the Left accuses the Right of anger at the news of Obama’s Peace Nobel. Here’s a typical one, but there are plenty more:
It certainly is interesting to watch the conservatives twisting in the wind. This is a win for America ”“ and again, the GOP can do nothing but bitch and moan. Keep up the good work.
Obama supporter Michael Tomasky, writing in the left-wing Guardian, agreed that the award was a bit absurd, and not warranted by anything Obama has ever accomplished. But he took heart in the following prediction:
But there is one lovely, delicious, delectable thing about the whole business: it will drive the American right wing up the wall.
I normally can’t stand to hear Rush Limbaugh’s voice, but I just might listen today. I might flip on Fox for a bit. I’ll make sure at some point this afternoon to Google “Orly Taitz and Obama Nobel” to imbibe the analysis on offer from the queen of the birthers. I’ll definitely check in on the rightwing websites, and I urge you to do the same if you have the time. It’s going to be an extremely entertaining day.
Sorry, Michael and the others: the Right has certainly done plenty of bitching, moaning, and tearing its collective hair out since that January day when Obama was inaugurated. But Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize for Good Intentions (and you know what they say about good intentions) offers the greatest opportunity for right wing entertainment since Jimmy Carter fought off the killer rabbit.
And unlike the Left, the Right has no Peace Prize disillusionment to deal with, because it learned long ago (certainly by 1994, when Yasser Arafat was the recipient) that the Prize was a worthless and hopelessly partisan accolade.
So how could this award to Obama possibly cause any sort of disappointment on the Right? On the contrary; the dominant emotion was a sort of manic glee. Since the Right has been complaining for decades about the Peace Prize, and criticizing Obama since his campaign began, what better gift could fate have bestowed than to unite those two targets in such a ludicrously tight embrace, a veritable folie a deux?
The delightful absurdity of the Committee’s decision, so transparently inappropriate that even most Obama supporters were left sputtering in astonishment and embarrassment, merely underscored what the Right already knew: that certain elements of Europe and the world now reside in a Leftist fantasyland in which words are as good (or even better, because they’re more pure) than deeds, and a dream is a Nobel Prize-winning wish your heart makes.
I made the following comment on an earlier thread, but it fits here too:
I was just reading the Ace of Spades thread on the original announcement. Some hilarious comments there.
That people who are not infatuated with Barack Obama can see humour in his being awarded the nobel peace prize, solely on the basis of his aspirations, rather then accomplishments should not distract form legitimate concerns that it may influence his future behaviour w.r.t. any international confrontation where military force is or may be relevant: Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Iraq (still) and possibly Honduras, if the Honduran people don’t see sense and ditch their constitution. Pehaps someone could ask Barack Obama what he is going to do, rather than say, to justify his acceptance of the award.
The Nobel Prize for Obama is a bribe. It only reflects badly on the recipient if he accepts it.
We citizens have a right and indeed a responsibility to demand that the President decline a publicly offered bribe. Obama should tell the Nobel foundation that the award was not only personally undeserved, but completely inappropriate for an elected official in his position. It puts him at risk of appearing compromised in fulfilling his responsibilities to the U.S. Constitution and American people. If Obama can’t figure this out for himself, we should help him. Our representatives in Congress should demand that he refuse the prize outright. Not show up, not accept anything, call out the Nobel foundation for trying to buy influence with its honor.
Yes. From what I can tell the Left was more distressed than the Right over Obama’s Nobel.
Furthermore the Left misread the Right’s reaction entirely. As one blogger put it, he looked forward to wingnuts’ heads exploding.
But that’s not what happened. Everyone was surprised, but once the surprise wore off, the Right was amused to see that its worst expectations of the Nobel had been validated, again, and that the award had made even Obama and his supporters uncomfortable.
I see the award as another fun-filled chapter in The Great Unraveling of Barack Obama.
Here’s the thing: Obama won the prize because his foreign policy is everything the right abhors, and yet according to liberals we’re supposed to congratulate him? They’re more deluded than I thought.
It’s also interesting to note that Obama’s Nobel reprises the recent Polanski Detente between the left and the right.
Ordinary folks across the spectrum understand that what the chattering elites are peddling is absurd and outrageous on its face.
Postliberal has a point — the Nobel really was a bribe. And Obama’s faux-modest acceptance statement can be read as an explicit acceptance of the terms of that bribe. He said something like (a paraphrase) “I understand this award not as an honor to me personally, but to a course of action.”
Someone somewhere I was reading suggested that after this and Obungler’s first and last term as POTUS, he might ascend to Secretary General of the U.N.; which would be a perfect culmination of his competition with the Clampets, I mean the Clintons; maybe Hill would return to the Republican party, and Bill would finally shack up with… http://images.google.com/images?q=bill+clinton's+affair&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7SUNA&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=NNPQSsTEGpOMtge__6TuAw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCQQsAQwAw
In the meantime, between POTUS and Secretary General, his Nobel fits like a perfect buffoon’s cap…
Well said, neo. I haven’t seen anyone on the Right angry about the prize, but instead laughing at it as something to priceless to make up.
The jokes are flying around. My favorite:
“Miss America was totally robbed. She was talking about world peace way before Obama.”
Huxley is right,
From some personal experience already I sense a lot of anger and embarrassment from liberals and leftists. Even a smirk of ridicule is making them angry and defensive. We need a t-shirt that encapsulates the ridicule we have for this surreal and idiotic moment.
I suspect that that’s because liberals and leftists run with the herd, and as such react strongly to social influences (hence, e.g., their anguish that the world did not like us – most conservatives couldn’t care less about that). They substitute social acceptance for individual conviction, and thus are acutely sensitive to any implication that they are not the cool kids, and moreover, the cool kids might not sign their year book. Laughing at people with that sort of insecurity is pretty guaranteed to anger them.
Heres an idea:
In the foreign policy arena, Obama has done little more than just emit hot air. He has done little to nothing else. Yet, he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
It occurred to me that I’ve done just about as much as Obama has, foreign policy wise: to wit, nothing… zip… zilch. So, I thought: why dont I get a prize? I, like Obama, did nothing.
Maybe all of us who did nothing to deserve a Nobel Peace Price should deluge the Nobel Proze people in Oslo with letters essentially saying: We did as much as Obama (namely nothing), wheres our prize?
Someone should start a campaign to write letters like this to the Nobel people… we did nothing too… wheres our prize?
We sat on our ass too… wheres our prize?
In fact, maybe that should be the chosen slogan: “Wheres Our Prize?”
It would be like a big practical joke . . . like the Nobel Peace Prize itself has become.
Folie é deux, folie é plusieurs, la folie partout! Folie! Folie! Folie!
Those of us who call ourselves “conservatives” mock or complain (count me among the complainers) because of the mockery it makes of the prize and the concept behind it. Why else would the refrain be “What has he done to earn this”?
But the left… they celebrate because it “drives the wingnuts up the wall”??
Does this show you who operates on principle and who operates from selfishness, or what?
It just hit me that Obama-speak and Muslim-speak use the same mechanism; say something that you craft in a way that you know your listeners will understand as reassurance, while meaning something very un-reassuring and totally different; code that only those who are in the know and think like you will interpret correctly.
So, for instance, Muslim spokesmen often swear that Islam is against the “murder of innocent civilians.” Westerners see this statement as a pretty categorical one. Muslims know and realize that Muslim thinkers argue that, by virtue of their rejection of “the one and only true religion of Islam and the word of Allah,” all unbelievers are “guilty” and, therefore, no unbelievers are or can be “innocent.” Muslims are also aware of the argument by Muslim ideologues that every citizen of the modern state–infant, young or old, male and female, in uniform or out–contributes, in one way or the other, directly or indirectly, to the military/fighting power of the modern state and, thus, there are really no “civilians.” So, to the attuned mind, “Islam is against the murder of innocent civilians” is decoded as, “it is perfectly OK, in fact obligatory, to–as the Qur’an commands, “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them,” because they are neither “innocent” nor “civilians.”
Similarly, five days before the election, Obama says that he is going to “Fundamentally Transform America”; most Americans heard this as “moving America in a more centrist or even Liberal direction,” those in the know on the far Left decoded this statement as; “finally, after many decades of subversion and laying the groundwork, it’s destroy America and the Capitalist system, and it’s all-out “Revolution, baby.”
The Nobel Prize, like any other, is only as good as its chosen recipients. We just confirmed how bad its really gotten.
Off-topic, but really worth reading — a neoneoconish woman tells of her neoconish journey:
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/10/10/how-this-ex-liberal-found-fortitude-and-her-way-home/comment-page-1/#comments
I think Obama’s win makes the Nobel prize even more irrelevant.
I’m figuring that he hasn’t won enough prizes yet, so how about the Heisman trophy, too?
You can write in a candidate for Nissan’s vote here:
http://tinyurl.com/r5ql9v
Good example of right-wing mirth: The latest installment of “Red State Update,” posted by the Anchoress:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/theanchoress/
We can laugh now. But considering how the Obama administration is demonstrating to every tyrant and malefactor around the world that, as long as Obama is president, the USA will stand by and watch them do whatever they want to do… how long will it be before this 2009 Nobel Peace Prize looks like a very cruel joke?
I’ve heard some commentary that O oughta get the Cy Young award for his awesome pitching at the All Star Game. It was inspiring, how you just knew he wanted to do a good job and all. Just because he wore Mom jeans and bounced the pitch – hey, we’re hopeful about how well he’s going to throw in the future!
Part of it is that the left *needs* us to be that way. They need it for two reasons.
First is the dichotomy they see between us – they are the good guys and we are the bad. Thus any anger (up to the fairly extreme we saw against Bush) is justified because of this. Any thing that seeks to put them in a bad light is, also by definition, angry and evil. If this were *not* true then a lot of things fall apart.
There are a number of lefties that disengage when I complain about certain things because of this. We can not *both* be against something and really only differ in solutions. I *must* be for killing, raping, and child abuse because they are against it and I’m Evil(TM).
Further many also currently have the need to have a “see they do it too” meme as a foil against 8 years of watching the Angry Left spew their hate. This is why Glen Beck is, by any leftist you will ever talk too, loved and adored by *everyone* on the right and he is our calming influence. Since they can not find enough of him they have to invent them.
I don’t know anyone who is angry Obama got it. The closest I can think of are ones that see this as just another example of the decline of the Western Thought – and frankly I agree. Angry is what I feel over the proposed health care plans and massive spending (though, on the bright side, both Iraq and Afghanistan are such a small tidbit of our budget now it doesn’t matter what we do fiscally – hard to find people basing a few billion when we are now talking a few trillion for something with even less support), not Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
Maybe the catcher called for a change-up!
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
I wouldn’t say Obama got the Nobel for good intentions. He got it for professed good intentions.
The reverse schadenfruede shows just how politically perverted and anti-American wingnuts are. That is funny if a little sad.
The reverse schadenfruede shows just how politically perverted and anti-American wingnuts are. That is funny if a little sad.
It’s “Schadenfreude”; joy in others misery. The reverse would be “Freudefreude”? Joy in others joy?
I remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism.
Obama is not “America”. He thinks America and most importantly, Americans should be taken down a few notches; that we should be humbled and be forced to “share our wealth”. He believes he is the agent that will humble and destroy America for our sins.
America wins when Obama fails.
What craven acts of National Abasement will he perform to ‘earn’ that hokum prize?
That is funny if a little sad
Yeah, I hear you…. I feel the same way about Obama’s Nobel prize.
” ” Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace. ” Jeremiah 8: 11b (NIV)
Jeremiah seems to have been talking about religious leaders falsely claiming God was not angry about sin, or maybe downplayng sin or the wrath of God, or maybe just plain false teaching, but still I keep thinking about this whenever I hear of some “peace” agreement in the Middle East or unilateral disarmament, etc.
I can’t think of any better way to encapsulate and focus the discussion about Obama’s lack of lifetime accomplishments. Before the prize, trying to point it out was just bitching. Now all you have to say is Nobel Peace Prize and everyone’s mind focuses on the empty list.
That’s a good sentence, and I’m glad I said it:
“What craven acts of National Abasement will Obama perform to ‘earn’ that hokum prize?”
I’m sure the dirty leftist Nobel Committee believes it bought the conscience of a US President for a paltry sum and a trinket. They read Obama’s pride correctly: they bought a US President for a pittance and a trinket.
libertas grande: sorry you’re feeling so sad. Let me try to cheer you up.
“Schadenfreude” is spelled as I just wrote it, by the way, and its definition is “pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.” So, what would “reverse schadenfreude” be (see this)? Either “pleasure derived from the good fortunes of others,” or “displeasure derived from the good fortunes of others” or perhaps “displeasure derived from the misfortunes of others.” I think it’s fairly clear that our glee at Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize would come under the first of the three definitions: “pleasure derived from the good fortunes of others.” Sounds pretty decent to me—wouldn’t that be a win-win situation?
But you call it “politically perverted and anti-American.” I guess any criticism of Obama would fall under that description, right? Am I also correct in assuming that mocking and reviling George Bush as a Nazi and an imbecile for eight years wouldn’t?
Wake me up when he wins an Emmy for all his television interviews, and an Oscar for his acting after which perhaps he might try and grab a fields medal.
Pleasure derived from the good fortunes of others is just plain old Freude – “joy” – no shadows involved.
I was going to link a clip of Karajan conducting Beethoven’s magnificent 9th symphony and the choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, when it occurred to me that the tune was chosen by the European Union as its anthem. Which could strike a jarring note somehow. Oh well.
Tom the Redhunter Says:
“Here’s the thing: Obama won the prize because his foreign policy is everything the right abhors, and yet according to liberals we’re supposed to congratulate him? They’re more deluded than I thought”
Yep, and without any judgement made as to whether it works
I see a Simpson’s episode where Homer is touring The Won’s trophy wall in the White House – with every award from the Nobel to the Pulitzer to the Grammy to Harvard Hall Monitor to Daytime Emmy – and turns away mumbling “Got me beat”….
Best line I heard Friday was that the Onion was acknowledging defeat and packing it in. Some sh*t is impossible to make up…
Actually, scratch your heads in puzzlement no more. It’s all due to accents and misspelling.
They meant to give him the Nobel P*SS (artist) prize — a new category.
See, there? All solved now. Easy mistake. 😀
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Hussein Obama is at worst a cynical ploy by Norway’s liberal elite to cajole our current administration while simulataneously chiding our last.
At best the award is meaningless.
To Obama’s starry-eyed throng the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t meaningless at all.
It is further validation (as if they needed any) of their conviction.
It is further justification (as if they needed any) to persist in adulating their God-king.
Neocon says: … mocking and reviling George Bush as a Nazi and an imbecile for eight years wouldn’t?
Well, Nazi was bit of hyperbole.
Any mention of GW’s presidential library cracks me up though.
Bush recieved a prize too: a shoe
logern shows up to snark about Geo. Bush instead of trying to figure out why Obama got the Nobel prize.
Of course.
Huh, neocon heads exploding?
That Progressives think this award does anything other than to perfectly highlight their detatchment from Reality only further proves that they are detatched from Reality.
I’m genuinly savoring this “teachable moment” and wish to humblely thank the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for its contributions towards the World’s understanding of Progressivism, and for which they should consider giving the next prize to themselves – just in case they haven’t already thought of it.
Even us hardcore wingnut malcontent warmongers, or those in my circles, are having chipper giggles about this over tea and crumpets. Uhrm, give or take. You should see the ashen faced fear of those liberals around when they realize what we are giggling about. They know they have no defenses. te he he
Even us hardcore wingnut malcontent warmongers, or those in my circles, are having chipper giggles about this over tea and crumpets. Uhrm, give or take. You should see the ashen faced fear of those liberals around when they realize what we are giggling about. They know they have no defenses. te he he
Actually I think it is kind of humorous. Now every decision made by Obama will be looked at through the prism of the Nobel. Is he making a decision because:
1. It is the right one
2. He has to prove he is not being manipulated by outside forces who seek to influence American policy
3. He wants to prove that he deserved the Nobel?
I think Obama and the left recognize that the Nobel committee did Obama no favors and that is why they are busy obfuscating.
What’s there to get angry or upset about? The Nobel Committee has merely reconfirmed its irrelevance to the real world (something which we on the Right have known for years), the Prize itself is further devalued (if that were possible), which also does not harm us in any way, and the fact of its awarding to O before any concrete actions towards “peace” have even been started, much less completed, is proving to be an embarrassment to the more thoughtful of his supporters. So what’s the downside?
“logern” is a near-anagram of “go, learn.”
I drop by here every so often because I enjoy the well thought out dialogue contributed by most people who provide comments. It gives me a chance to read and evaluate other people’s thoughts and ideas.
It does interest me that there are a couple of exceptions that demonstrate the reverse of any actual thought or an attempt at dialogue. One is “logern” and the other I forget because his stuff, I cannot find an apt word to describe such drivel, is so poorly written as to make wonder whether he has even an inclination as to what ratiocination means.
I hope you don’t mean me ’cause I had to go look ‘ratiocination’ up.
FLASH!!
This just in!
Neville Chamberlain will be given a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize along with Obama. When contacted at his resting place at Westminster Abbey, the former Prime Minister had this to say.
SNL made fun of Obama over this last night. This time, they made fun of him not only in the opening skit but also in the weekend update.
Best line by Seth Meyers IMHO: “Obama said in his acceptance speech that this was a call for action. Isn’t that what the election was for?”
Cracks me up because at the same time he both mocks the prize as meaningless and mocks the president for calling it meaningful.
Uh oh. More fact checking coming up from AP and CNN!
I’m amused in principle, fricking worried in practice… As Vieux Charles said, upthread,
…whereas to us on the Right, while the prize itself has (once again!) been revealed as meaningless in terms of what its meaning was originally and purports to be still, we don’t delude ourselves that its awarding is meaningless. It IS, in fact, a bribe, attempted and accepted. Is the President an honest politician – does he stay bought? If so, well, I guess Norway owns our foreign policy now… If not, I won’t be surprised, but as Dennis says upthread, I will be wondering at his motivation:
In any case, accepting the award, even or perhaps especially on the grounds on which he accepted it, is only further evidence of his naivete – at best. At worst, I’d have to venture into the realm of conspiracy theories, a place I don’t like to go. So I’m sticking with naivete.
The amusement would be easier to muster up if so much didn’t ride on this man’s judgment.
I cannot conceive of why anyone on the right would be angry about this. It is plain to anyone with any sense at all that the award was not deserved, but is that not a metaphor for what we have been saying about Obama all along? The award really has only two effects: (1) it confirms everything we have been saying about the Left, which is a good thing; and (2) it is such an obvious farce that one cannot help but view it with amusement, which is also a good thing. The only people who have any reason at all to be angry are the people who still believe the Nobel Peace Prize actually means something–which strikes me as naieve after Arafat, et al.–and the prior winners who actually deserved it–and now associate their own awards with the farce it has become.