When you consider what follows....

[fpb]

...the award to Obama stops being a joke and becomes a scandal. Apparently, the defeated candidates included the following:
Chinese Human Rights Activist Hu Jia - imprisoned for campaigning for human rights in the PRC.
Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China's communist system. (Not to mention the symbolic value of awarding a Chinese dissident on the 20th Anniversary of the Tianenmen Square Massacre.)
Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute has built nearly 80 schools, especially for girls, in remote areas of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past 15 years.
Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, a philosophy professor in Jordan who risks his life by advocating interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims.
Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar. She currently leads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and serves as the U.N. special envoy to Darfur.

And someone observed that the man who invented fibre optics - probably the most important single invention since the radio - in the sixties has only just received the Nobel Prize for Physics. When such prizes are awarded sanely, they are awarded to a career - not to a "hope".

Comments

[expectare.livejournal.com]

Wei Jingsheng is awesome!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Ah, but not as "promising" as the president.

[arhyalon.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear. Well put.

Greg Mortensen is personal hero of mine. I'm a huge fan of his work...but I would have given it to one of the Chinese gentlemen, had it been me.

(Of course, I'm in China now listening to my new daughter chat on the phone with her girlfriend in Cantonese.)

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Amen!

[ani-bester.livejournal.com]

Oh god, yeah okay now this isn't just a "ok whatever," it's officially in the WTF range.

I know of people more deserving, but I dind't know the actual other nominees and HOLY CRIPES *sigh*

[becomethesea.livejournal.com]

FPB, this might be a silly question--but what is your best advice to a young American in context of what has been going on lately?

I ask because I am thinking very seriously of getting out of the USA while I still have time. I don't know yet where I would go, but the future of the USA/its politics looks grim from my perspective.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The rest of the world is pretty much similar. Stay and fight for what you believe in. Not that I agree with your views, but they suit the USA better than most other countries.

[becomethesea.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Also, they say if you're not liberal when you're young... :-)

Now it is an outrage

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

I had not heard the names of the candidates passed over. This had been an amusing joke, something worthy of a wry shake of the head. After hearing this, it is enough to induce vomiting.