Third time’s the charm…
First there was Jimmy Carter… sorry, just got back up from the floor. Jimmy freaking Carter got the Nobel Prize for his bang up job of bringing peace to the middle east. We should give him credit, it lasted thirty seconds longer than the previous cease fire. Not to oversimplify, but this is a former president who has broken with history and openly and repeatedly criticized a sitting president. It would matter if he had a single proud moment in office himself.
As if Carter wasn’t enough, next there came one of this generation’s greatest opportunist hypocrites, Albert Gore, inventor of Al-Gore-Tex, the fabric that allows abject failure in the political arena and a running and disturbingly accurate imitation of everyone’s grandmother (wonder if there’s more to that) to bead up and slide right off his career.
Taking a page from his own rain shedding fabric days, he figured there would be serious money in global warming (or is it global cooling this decade?) The smart thing his advisers came up with (we know he didn’t come up with it because he’s just a card reader like Obama) is the idea that instead of actually doing something about the “crisis” — like creating a green energy company or simply reducing the energy footprint of his mansion in Tennessee, or maybe leaving the private jet at home, or maybe dropping his convoy to a skeletal 10 gas-guzzling SUVs and Towncars burning ozone to and from every possible speaking engagement his handlers can schedule — anyway, instead of doing anything real about the “crisis”, his sage advisors said “hey, you could try your hand in the scary and accountable private sector for the first time since that 5 year stint at The Tennessean newspaper after college, or you could turn this lemon stretch of the natural environmental cycle into hysterically sweet solid gold lemonade in the bank.” And rain gold it has for the sweet talker from Tennessee. But a funny thing happened on the way to selling the Brooklyn Bridge…
Even Gore never imagined the clueless in Norway, adorned with nose rings of popular hysteria, could possibly be taken in by the shameless and insincere opportunism he embodied with the acting talent of, well, Al Gore. But they did. And those of us who thought that the Jimmy Carter prize was the last straw, certainly lost faith entirely in the judgment of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Which bring us to the third of the infamous leftists: Paul (“Bush would be Satan, if there was a God”) Krugman. He’s the nerdy kid who used to cry just being near a fight in school, let alone being in one. He’s a lone beacon to the dwindling pseudo-intellectual self-obsessed New York readership, and the formerly somewhat respectable paper that prints his vile bile. I imagine him at his desk, crying at the violence of his blind fury (because fury is scary) and yet smiling through his tears for the self-congratulatory vengeance he feels his words get him on the conservative that stomped his frailty or stole his girl in some former time. His bully pulpit provides a thick network of flaming and smoldering leftists to insulate his frantic and desperate anger, so he’s safe to blather on, reciting the socialist and leftist talking points like a male version of Surrender Poodle Pelosi but without the stones.
I imagine Alfred Nobel would certainly take his mighty invention and blow all of Scandinavia to the judgment seat of the Almighty if he were alive to be ashamed of the state to which this prize has devolved: prizes awarded to a forgettable president, a transparent money-grubber, and the poster child of desperately shrill.
With these offenses, the Nobel Prize is certainly less fair and reasonable but closely resembling an Oscar these days, as Oscars are won solely on crony or agenda popularity, rather than by merit as awards should be.
I guess that’s why Gore’s won both.
Krugman could win an oscar for crying on cue, but for him it wouldn’t be acting.