The Days of Whine and Neuroses

I've long been a fan of stories of alternate history - tales of what might have been had Lee won at Gettysburg, the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, or the Germans at Stalingrad. Upon waking up this morning and hearing on the radio that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, I wondered if I had woken up in just such a story - so mind-boggling was the news.

There was a time when the Nobel Peace Prize actually meant something, such as when Theodore Roosevelt won the award in 1906 for helping negotiate the Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War, or when Vice President Charles G. Dawes won the prize in 1925 for devising a plan that restructured Germany's World War I reparations payments. Hell, even those laureates who were undeserving - Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, and Al Gore - at least had actual accomplishments to their names. But Barack Obama? Absolutely nothing.

So that begs the question, for what did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? Whining. Whining about how America was so "arrogant" during the eight prior to his election.

George W. Bush, a president who was actually proud to be an American, never acquiesced to the self-styled sophisticated leaders of socialist Europe. Those European leaders - and their ilk - did next to nothing during the past sixty-four years to advance the causes of liberty and freedom around the world while tens of thousands of American died doing so. So why should we give a damn what they think?

Earlier today, Robert Stacy McCain made a good point in a comment to this post:

Lewis Grizzard once wrote a bestseller titled, I Haven't Understood Anything Since 1962. Of course, I was only 3 years old in 1962, but the basic point is true. The evil forces of Modern Progress are such that, the longer you live, the less the world makes sense.

I'm sixteen years younger than Stacy, and the world does indeed make less sense to me than it did a decade ago. Nowadays, not congratulating Obama on his unearned award is akin to siding with terrorists according to a certain Democratic Party hack, and having an unrepentant domestic terrorist ghost-write one's biography is proof of one's superior intellect.

All hail our modern-day Herakles!

Update:

Once again, I have the privilege of being linked by Robert Stacy McCain, wherein a commenter named CGHill informs me that in addition to his Nobel Prize, Vice President Dawes made a lasting contribution to music:

...his 1912 piano piece, "Melody in A Major," fitted with lyrics by Carl Sigman, was a substantial pop hit for Tommy Edwards (twice!), the Four Tops, and Van Morrison, under the title "It's All in the Game." ("Many a tear has to fall / But it's all / In the game...")

Here is the tune as sung by The Four Tops: