“I hate George W. Bush,” New Republic columnist Jonathan Chait wrote on March 15, 2004, in a ground-breaking piece detailing a loathing unrestrained in its scope.
Chait said he detested Bush’s gait, voice, and posture. He had friends who found him an “oppressive force” on their spirits. “I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him,” he said rather proudly, “and while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him…I would hate him even more.”
Apparently, Bush has the same effect on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which since 2002, has been in a frenzy about him, nominating a succession of jerks just to teach him a lesson, no matter how silly it made it appear.
In 2002, it named ex-president James Earl Carter, a thorn in the side of each president after, who tried to sabotage Bush’s efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (as he had tried to undermine those of Bush-pere 11 years earlier).
In 2005, it was U.N. weapons inspector Mohamed El Baradei, who, besides being anti-American, turned out to be in Iran’s pocket. In 2007, it was former Vice-President Albert Gore Jr., who lost the Florida recount and the election to Bush in 2000 by an infinitesimal margin, and since then had jetted around the world to Save the Earth rallies, giving speeches against global warming (often in cold snaps and snow storms), while running up energy bills in his mansion in Nashville more than 12 times the national average.
Any one of these in itself should have made the committee a laughing stock, but it went ahead anyhow, blinded, it seemed, by terminal animus. In the New Statesman, Simon Reid-Henry suggested that by naming Carter, Gore, and now Barack Obama, the committee was trying to create an alternative past in which Gore was elected, and Bush never existed, or at least never was president.
The Carter and Gore “awards” had gotten some people grumbling that the committee was dealing in pique, not in merit, but this was an underground theme that had failed to get traction. And then the committee took one step too far in the Chaitred direction, and Bush got belated revenge.
When the announcement was made that Obama had “won” for 10 months (or two weeks) of underachievement, reporters who heard it were stunned. Bloggers thought they linked by mistake to sites like The Onion or Scrappleface.
“A gold-medal headache,” said the Politico. The tone that emerged within minutes was not how wonderful it was that Obama had won, but what he could do to lessen the damage.
Center-left pundits said that he ought to reject this great honor. “Many TV reports…were delivered with a smirk,” The Politico added. “When the dust settles, the biggest loser of all could be the credibility of the Nobel Committee itself.”
Many said it was like grammar school, (“peewee soccer” in the words of Ruth Marcus), where all of the children get prizes for trying. But peace everywhere, in the Middle East in particular, is what all presidents try to achieve.
They work themselves into pulps and a frazzle trying to get it, none more than Bill Clinton, who spent the last weeks of his tenure in a desperate effort to get the Palestinians and Israelis to coexist in tranquility.
It fell through because Yassir Arafat (a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a world renowned terrorist) had no interest whatever in peace. But he wasn’t George Bush, (who then was a governor), so he was acceptable. As were Carter, Obama, and Gore.
Bush’s reputation is in history’s hands (which, if Iraq settles down, may view him quite kindly), but that of the Peace Prize committee is dead. It has cheapened itself, and the prizes it gave in the past decade, especially those given to Gore and Carter, which, it is clear now came not from achievement but petulance.
It fired at Bush, but hit itself and Obama, whose life it has made much more difficult. It blew itself up in frenzy of loathing. Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad, goes the old saying. Or at least, mad at George W. Bush.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
