Pulling an Orwell in Norway

The place: Norway; the occasion: the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech from the Master of Rhetoric.

Shorter Obama:

“Until America gets everything it could possibly want—which includes unlimited resources and a continuation unchanged of the lifestyle to which our richest have become accustomed—there’s gonna be war. Until America doesn’t experience pants-shitting terror every time another nation achieves even 1% of our glory, there’s gonna be war. Anyway, thanks for the award and thanks for playing. Peace out.”

Though that was shorter, it wasn’t that much shorter. Whatever. I wonder whether Obama’s ever embarrassed for himself?

Shorter left-wing pundits:

“It’s obvious he agonized over the decision because he took literally months to decide to escalate the war in Afghanistan.”

Actually, he told America over and over and over again during most of his campaign that Afghanistan was the right war and that he would escalate the battle there and in Pakistan. He’s actually fulfilling a campaign promise, for those that ever bothered to listen to what his pretty mouth was saying instead of looking into his dreamy brown eyes and imagining a completely different soundtrack based solely on one’s own public policy fantasies.

What is so surreal is that the Nobel committee wasn’t listening either and gave him a Peace Prize (for Christ’s sake). So, he trundles on over to Norway with his by-now legendary speech-writer in tow (yeah, he may vet them, but he doesn’t write them) and tells a room full of very rueful Europeans who have long since woken up with a “Hope Hangover” that there are situations in which war is unavoidable while we strive for peace.

There are those who applaud him for his realism, but it’s not realism, it’s just Obama demonstrating his ability for riding the fence on every goddamned issue ever. He’d totally be for peace, but you know how things go: a bunch of guys in the poorest country in the world don’t like America and they might, you know, attack it. Un-f%$#king-believable that we’re still buying that horseshit. We’ve got troops swarming all over the place there, stomping it even flatter and poorer and hungrier than it ever was and we’re crying the whole time that they’re just inches away from destroying our entire country.

Surreal.

And for promising to escalate that charade—to keep the world safe from crazy Muslims bent on Caucasian destruction—Obama gets a Peace Prize. It’s quite a tradition by now. Kissinger got one in ‘73 for agreeing to end American involvement in Vietnam in what were generally called “peace negotiations” but could more accurately have been called “surrender negotiations”. At the time he got it, he was prosecuting a secret war in Cambodia that killed millions. It was secret, though, so how was the Nobel committee to know he’d do something like that? It’s not like he had a violent track record. He followed it up with a putsch in Chile that killed dozens of thousands and installed one of the worst dictators of the 20th century. But, hell, he already had the thing by then, so no take-backs, right?

Obama’s just following the Kissinger principle when he not only allows drone attacks to continue in Afghanistan, but expands the whole program to include Pakistan as well. Entire countries worth of collateral damage, à la Kissinger. Chapeau.