I wrote the following letter to the Wall Street Journal today on the farcical Nobel Peace Prize for Obama Dead Eyes (hey, that rhymes!).
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When I first read an email on President Obama’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, I thought it originated from the satirical Onion.com.
Alas, I was naïve and suffering from short-term memory lapse, for the pacifist-prize committee has shown its inclinations for satire many times before with prizes going to the likes of Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa, Le Duc Tho and (the piece de resistance) Al Gore.
The peace prize is, and always has been, a content-less, subjective, murky and unprincipled award. It should be supplanted with a Nobel Liberty Prize, for you cannot have peaceful nations without liberty and laws girding individual rights. A liberty prize could be easily defined and, therefore, circumscribed by objective definition and evaluation – as are the science prizes, for the most part. The liberty-prize committee could have as its standard the original U.S. Constitution and decide which person or group does the most to bring their country’s laws the farthest toward such a constitution’s ideals.
Over the last century, a liberty prize would have been immensely more meaningful and a true barometer for worldwide freedom (or “peace,” if you like) with such winners as Ronald Reagan, Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the very few principled winners of a Nobel), Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher and Charles Krauthammer. Such a prize would take the onion breathe out of the award and stop making it a symbol of liberty-quislings with political gamesmanship as their ephemeral guide.
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