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We here at FDL have criticized Obama’s Nobel as premature. We also recognize that the award’s power lies in its ability to influence future conduct – by empowering agents of change and narrowing the options of its opponents – as well as to reward past achievement. And we certainly have no kind words for Mr. Obama’s refusal to turn his rhetoric about constructive change into practical policy. He has left proponents of financial and health care reform, of civil rights, and of a restrained use of the military in the lurch, like Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to head the OLC.
That criticism is rational and fact-based, attributes not shared by young Ross Douthat’s criticisms of Mr. Obama’s Nobel. Admittedly, Ross has a tough job. In his columns, he must pretend to have more experience than David Broder’s coffee cup. He must appear ardently more neoconservative than the quiet radical, David Brooks. He must have more intellectual gravitas than Bill Kristol. (One out of three ain’t bad.)
Those challenges leave Mr. Douthat nothing to do but sputter at “five obscure Norwegians” as they attempt to use the lever of public opinion to lift the weight of US aggression and mismanagement off the world’s shoulders. Their fulcrum is the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Douthat does not appreciate their efforts. More likely, he’s afraid they might succeed. So he taunts Mr. Obama into being “man enough” to toss back their prize, preferably with a Cheneyite snarl about European humbug. American humbug, I guess, is A-OK. Ross rolls demeaning characterization over innuendo-laced barb as if tossing a Beck-Limbaugh salad: all vinegar and ICE-free, immigrant-picked greens; no oil or water.
Obama is Katrina FEMA’s Michael Brown: “Heckuva Job, Barack”, wordplay that denudes Mr. Brown of his GOP party loyalty and Mr. Bush of his incompetence. The award, says young Ross, should have gone to any of the other 200 nominees, including,
Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s heroic opposition leader; or Thich Quang Do, the Buddhist monk and critic of Vietnam’s authoritarian regime; or Rebiya Kadeer, exiled from China for her labors on behalf of the oppressed Uighur minority; or anyone who has courted death this year protesting for democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
A tad overstated, Ross? It’s doubtful whether the nominees Mr. Douthat finds so worthy – they are – would have received a US entry visa under Mr. Bush. Nor would they have had their efforts to make their countries safe havens from predator states and predator corporations rewarded by his State Department. Ross is blackly hilarious in praising the Uighurs. His Mr. Bush sent knowingly innocent Uighurs to Gitmo for years without trial and, when that became unpalatable, shipped them off to islands in the middle of the Pacific.
Ross throws in the obligatory taunts to Mr. Obama’s base, too:
It confirms, as a defining narrative of his presidency, the gap between his supporters’ cloud-cuckoo-land expectations and the inevitable disappointments of reality…. And it revives and ratifies John McCain’s only successful campaign gambit — his portrayal of Obama as “the world’s biggest celebrity,” famous more for being famous than for any concrete political accomplishment.
It’s doubtful whether the inexperienced Mr. Douthat has ever not been disappointed by reality; even Harvard was probably more and less than he hoped, and a lot more expensive. (Or is that painting with the same broad brush as Ross?) More debatable is whether Mr. McCain had one “successful campaign gambit”, including his choice as running mate the “famous for being famous” Sarah Palin.
Mr. Douthat is the strep throat of refreshing voices. His bravery is of the office-party variety. Grappling with words and shooting quips is the closest he will come to a war zone. The Times was practical enough to let Bill Kristol go. It’s time for them to draft his replacement. I’m waiting for them to make Marcy Wheeler an offer she can’t refuse.
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What cloud cuckoo land expectations? I didn’t even vote for the guy. Obama’s Peace Prize shows just how starving the world is for some real direction, leadership, and just reasonability after the insanity of the Bush years. I don’t think that they will get it with Obama. I would agree that Obama does not deserve the Nobel. The difference between someone like me and Douhat is that Douhat would still be writing the same column even if Obama was deserving of it. Neocons suffer from a kind of terminal disappointment. They want to be loved and appreciated by the rest of the world and don’t understand why bombing them doesn’t produce this effect.
I hope the Times thinks they are getting their money’s worth, because I simply do not see it. Never have. He’s a moron.
I suspect Ross Douthat has seen Dr. Strangelove a dozen times, and still doesn’t know why it’s funny. He’s an inexperienced twit with an Ivy League degree who masquerades as someone with something important to say. That the Times buys it, along with its other questionable OpEd choices and the free rein it is giving steno-journalists who work for Rahm, suggests Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ will have no trouble dominating the NYC market.
I agree that Ross would be attacking Obama even if the Prize had been awarded for his past accomplishments, rather than for the direction he could take America – which is another way of congratulating him and gently twisting his arm because he’s NotBush.
The Nobel committee’s collective sigh of relief is premature; their hopes and ours may be dashed. Obama is not the leader we need or hoped for. His hesitancy is not about the votes he can command, it’s about who he is, and the gaps between his public platform and his real policy preferences, for which he can twist out the votes. That Obama is so much better than McCain would have been – and that measured by her qualifications to be president, Sarah Palin is from another planet entirely – demonstrates how broken our political system is.
On another thread today, Skdadl linked to an excellent Canadian blog, Canadian Cynic. Its Lindsay Stewart commented on America’s disappointment that Canada won’t take a few of our worn and beaten Gitmo prisoners off our hands.
Lindsay was impolite enough to point out what few American papers would, that we’ve horribly abused a Canadian minor for six years, and still refuse to try or release him. More generally, Lindsay took America to task with a slogan made famous by American merchandisers – “You break it, it’s yours.”
America didn’t need the world’s help to break so many things: heads, treaties, ancient rights. Yet it comes crawling for the world to take off its hands the innocent bodies we’ve broken, because our Neanderthal Congress refuses allow them to settle here. There’s also the little matter that we probably owe hundreds of millions in compensation, which I haven’t read about in the MSM either.
Commenting about the White House’s reaction to Canada’s decision not to help resettle the bones we broke, Lindsay writes:
A blog to watch.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think any Uighurs went to the Pacific under Bush. The handful of Uighurs freed during the Bush administration were relocated to Albania. The second handful of extraditions — to the Pacific island of Pulau, as well as to Bermuda — took place under Obama.
This week’s Tom Tomorrow nails the Nobel issue in pitch-perfect fashion: The Idea of Obama.
As a replacement of sorts for Kristol, though, he’s much easier to make fun of!
I think ralphbon is correct that the Uighurs were physically moved on Obama’s watch. Bush had been trying for years to persuade a country too small for China to bother about to take them. Obama found one in mid-Pacific.
Here’s an eloquent vote for why the NotBush award was worthwhile:
(h/t David Neiwert @ C&L, who has more.)
In supporting the Nobel award to Obama in his, Remembering Carl von Ossietzky, Scott Horton says that criticism from the right and left demonstrates a “simple misunderstanding of the purposes of the prize”:
Horton goes on to recount Carl von Ossietzsky’s journalistic heroism, opposing the excesses of Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920′s and its descent into Nazism in the 1930′s. Rather than go into exile like his colleagues and his literary forebears Emile Zola and Victor Hugo, von Ossietzsky thought it his duty to submit to a prison term for his writings. He did and was released in 1932.
A year later, the Nazis took power and imprisoned him again, making him one of the first internees in their system of Konzentrationslager. He was released following a report by a Swiss observer, which threatened to damage Germany’s reputation shortly before the 1936 Olympische Spiele in Berlin. He accepted the award, despite intense German pressure to reject it. “He died from the consequences of torture and tuberculosis in 1938.”
Horton recounts how Obama has revivified hopes that America will use diplomacy as well as military force. He has abandoned Bush’s provocative and dangerous “missile defense system” in Eastern Europe. He has given stirring speeches to the Islamic world. He has put nuclear non-proliferation back on the American foreign policy agenda.
I agree with Mr. Horton that Mr. Obama has the capability to lead the US and the world in a vastly different direction than Mr. Bush. That’s one reason he won the award and Jonah Goldberg and individual Iranian protesters did not. The question is whether he has the political will to make more than speeches. The Nobel committee was encouraging him to display it.
I differ with Mr. Horton in that I do not see in Mr. Obama’s actions the physical and political courage displayed by von Ossietzsky, by Shirin Ebadi, by Andre Sakharov or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Rather, I see political calculation and defense of the national security state, and a capitulation to those who, in Churchill’s phrase, want more war, war instead of jaw, jaw.
The hesitancy Mr. Obama displays in reforming health care and banking sectors is equally on display in his unfulfilled promises to close our prison at Guantanamo Bay (he’s expanding the one at Bagram), or to rein in our foreign wars. Bringing justice to those wrongfully interned and tortured there, for example, is not on his agenda. Neither is resettling them in the US or compensating them for wrongs knowingly done to them. Neither is bringing to justice those who set up the global system of torture and detention of which Gitmo was a part. If he were to pursue those goals with determination, he would validate the Nobel’s committee’s optimism that he will put his words into action.