Some wingnuts don't want Al Gore to win the Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow:
Awarding AlBore the Nobel “Peace” prize would prove the absurdity of the prize once and for all. Bring it on.
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After prior winners like Yasser Arafat, Kofi Annan, and Jimmy Carter you have to wonder if this prize has become political.
CAD professionals and manufacturers join in as well. And of course Michelle Malkin took time out from stalking 12-year olds to snark about Gore:
Well, the Big Reveal will take place on Friday, and Gore has canceled on a Babs Boxer fundraiser to travel overseas for the announcement. (Update: Or not? HT - HAHeadlines)
No doubt he’s already purchased carbon offsets for the trip…if he does indeed win the prize.
Don’t forget: You can offset his offsets here!
Malkin has a history of mocking Gore's efforts and "hypocrisy," which makes the offset offsets even richer in...something. The wingersphere likes to yell about Bush Derangement Syndrome, but there's reasonable cause for that while their hatred of Gore is something I just cannot fathom. You'd think he'd launched an immoral, illegal war that has killed over a million people and will cost upwards of 2 trillion dollars for no good reason. Really, it's complete denial about the issue of global warming and hatred of somebody who is trying to be constructive rather than destructive:
Gore shouldn't even have been nominated, and if he actually wins the thing it will be a slap in the face to other nominees who have genuinely worked for peace, such as Irena Sendler, a Pole who saved more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Holocaust in World War Two, and Finland's former President Martti Ahtisaari. And they, by the way, were acting out of genuine humanity, rather than being motivated by self-interest and conceit.
It would also be an insult to the memory of every past winner (Arafat, Carter and a couple of others excepted), including Jean Henry Dunant, Founder of the Red Cross, Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Luther King.
It would be a disgrace.
The reason it would be a disgrace? Because a judge in the UK decided there were 9 "errors" in Gore's movie. I'm not even going to address them, but they appear at first blush to be trivial and a misunderstanding of the actual facts presented. I'm just amused that people think that any movie would be completely error-free and that these specifics somehow destroy Gore's overall point about the scientific consensus or that an award he hasn't even necessarily won yet would be "tainted" somehow.
So was Gore nominated solely because of An Inconvenient Truth? No, of course not--it's one component of his consistent work that started well before this single project:
“A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference,” Conservative Member of Parliament Boerge Brende, a former minister of environment and then of trade, told The Associated Press.
Brende said he joined political opponent Heidi Soerensen of the Socialist Left Party to nominate Gore as well as Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier before the nomination deadline expired Thursday.
“Al Gore, like no other, has put climate change on the agenda. Gore uses his position to get politicians to understand, while Sheila works from the ground up,” Brende said.
"I think climate change is the biggest challenge we face in this century," Brende said.
During eight years as Bill Clinton’s vice president, Gore pushed for climate measures, including the Kyoto Treaty. Since leaving office in 2001 he has campaigned worldwide, including with his Oscar-nominated documentary on climate change called “An Inconvenient Truth.”
But whatever.
Of course there have been many controversies over prize awards and the omission of awards to the likes of Mahatma. Clearly the fact that he never won shows that he wasn't a very good peace ambassador...or, uh, maybe the Nobel Prize is compromised, or, er, more likely it doesn't mean anything at all.
In response to the Right's complaints about various Monsters who have been awarded the Prize (more on that in a moment), Lefties usual bring up Henry "Never Met A Dictator He Didn't Like If It Were Convenient" Kissinger:
At its meeting on October 16 the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting decided to award the Peace Prize for 1973 to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the two chief negotiators who succeeded in arranging the ceasefire after negotiating for nearly four years.
For many long and bitter years the civilian population of Vietnam and the fighting troops engaged on both sides had borne the sufferings and privations of war. This was a war that concerned not only Vietnam and its people; it was a war moreover that had poisoned the atmosphere in countries and between countries all over the world.
Never since the conclusion of the Second World War have the people of Vietnam enjoyed unbroken peace.
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The Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting was fully aware that a ceasefire and not a peace agreement was involved. They realised that peace has not yet come to Vietnam, and that the sufferings of the population of Vietnam are not at an end. They were also aware that events in Vietnam may yet endanger the détente in the world. The ceasefire agreement was only the first but a tremendously important step on the laborious road to full peace in Vietnam.
It is our hope that the two chief negotiators and statesmen who have been awarded the Peace Prize this year will show the same understanding of the purpose and intention of the award as that expressed by Chancellor Willy Brandt in his speech here in this Festival Hall when he received the Peace Prize for 1971:
"Nobel's Peace Prize is the highest honour, but at the same time the one that imposes the greatest obligations, that can be bestowed on any man bearing political responsibility."
Perhaps it was a bit naive, but Vietnam was a major moral disaster and encouraging the peace process was certainly a noble (pun not intended) idea. You can't really have peace without parties attempting to bring it about, so I actually don't think this was a horrible award as some people do, nor does it taint Nobel.
Similarly, when wingers complain about Arafat winning 1/3 of the 1994 award, I observe that the conflict would never end if those involved didn't realize it's not in their peoples' interests to continue it and subsequently let go of age-old grudges. Rabin and Peres were necessarily not the only ones involved in breaking the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate and giving the area a realistic chance at peace (that was squandered in the end). Same goes for John Hume, who needed David Trimble to bring the Northern Ireland peace process to fruition, for which the pair were awarded the Nobel in 1998.
That said, I don't think anybody can doubt that in 2002 the award wrongly went to History's Greatest Monster, who said:
Most Nobel Laureates have carried out our work in safety, but there are others who have acted with great personal courage. None has provided more vivid reminders of the dangers of peacemaking than two of my friends, Anwar Sadat and Yitzak Rabin, who gave their lives for the cause of peace in the Middle East.
Like these two heroes, my first chosen career was in the military, as a submarine officer. My shipmates and I realized that we had to be ready to fight if combat was forced upon us, and we were prepared to give our lives to defend our nation and its principles. At the same time, we always prayed fervently that our readiness would ensure that there would be no war.
Later, as President and as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, I was one of those who bore the sobering responsibility of maintaining global stability during the height of the Cold War, as the world's two superpowers confronted each other. Both sides understood that an unresolved political altercation or a serious misjudgment could lead to a nuclear holocaust. In Washington and in Moscow, we knew that we would have less than a half hour to respond after we learned that intercontinental missiles had been launched against us. There had to be a constant and delicate balancing of our great military strength with aggressive diplomacy, always seeking to build friendships with other nations, large and small, that shared a common cause.
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The world has changed greatly since I left the White House. Now there is only one superpower, with unprecedented military and economic strength. The coming budget for American armaments will be greater than those of the next fifteen nations combined, and there are troops from the United States in many countries throughout the world. Our gross national economy exceeds that of the three countries that follow us, and our nation's voice most often prevails as decisions are made concerning trade, humanitarian assistance, and the allocation of global wealth. This dominant status is unlikely to change in our lifetimes.
Great American power and responsibility are not unprecedented, and have been used with restraint and great benefit in the past. We have not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom, and we have consistently reached out to the international community to ensure that our own power and influence are tempered by the best common judgment.
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It is clear that global challenges must be met with an emphasis on peace, in harmony with others, with strong alliances and international consensus. Imperfect as it may be, there is no doubt that this can best be done through the United Nations, which Ralph Bunche described here in this same forum as exhibiting a "fortunate flexibility" - not merely to preserve peace but also to make change, even radical change, without violence.
He went on to say: "To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war."
Despicable! I don't know how anybody could vote for a guy who works with Habitat for Humanity and stands up to awful regimes.
Oh, right, it's not really a popularity contest or an election. It's one award based on the will of the guy who invented dynamite, and if somebody wins the Peace Prize or not it doesn't negate any other good or bad works they might do in their lives. It recognizes specific good that laureates have brought to bear in a Cosmos that doesn't really make judgments for us.
If Gore wins, that will certainly be a nice addition to the Oscar and the Emmy. Yet it won't stop global warming so he still has, as was observed before, the obligation to continue his work. And if he doesn't win, it means somebody else was viewed as having more impact on our continuous struggle for peace.
As for the notion that somehow the Nobels have become "political," I say: no duh. Allow me to borrow from Clausewitz and note that peace is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means.
So it doesn't really matter how many people get pissed if Gore wins or crow if he "loses." He continues to do important things to improve the world, which is the whole point.
ntodd
[Update: now that he's won, there is more gnashing of teeth. Boohoohoo.]
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