What is it with Nobel Peace Prize Winners?

Anyone ever wonder if maybe the accolade one receives for winning the Peace Prize is a little much? I mean let’s face it, an awful lot of the people who win it seem to go off the deep end; rapidly becoming both more ridiculous and sanctimonious than Jerry Falwell.

Take the recent case of Betty Williams. She got the prize 30 years ago for organizing people to demand an end to the violence in Northern Ireland. Seems like a pretty nice goal.

Now lets take a look at her most recent statement at something called The Earth Dialogues Forum held in Australia.

All quotes are from The Australian web site:
“"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.
"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered. “
Great, another idiot who thinks if George Bush weren’t around then everything would be so perfect. How do these people let one person have so much control over their lives?
"We went to a hospital where there were 200 children; they were beautiful, all of them, but they had cancers that the doctors couldn't even recognize. From the first Gulf War, the mothers' wombs were infected.”
Wow! I had no idea one got cancer from an infection. Imagine the power of diagnosis here, not only can the exact cause of the cancer be found, but the exact moment: the first Gulf War. This is especially astounding given that Saddam used poison gas all over the place and was at that time developing chemical and biological weapons. Yet this woman can pinpoint the exact 110 hours (the length of the first Gulf War) during which the mother “caught cancer”. What does George Bush Two have to do with this? Who knows but lets kill him anyway I guess.
“ Wrapping up the three-day forum yesterday, delegates agreed to a 26-point action plan.
"There can be no sustainable peace while the majority of the world's population lives in poverty," they said. “
Yeah ok, I guess maybe that’s true, who knows. We seem to be pretty rich yet get blamed for starting all the wars. Anyway, so what? Nobody lives poverty. Hey, lets have a Global War on Poverty, kinda like LBJ announced 30 years ago. Oops, that’s right, that didn’t work out so well. Oh well, lets just issue a statement that we are against world poverty, that always helps a lot.
"There can be no sustainable peace if we fail to rise to the global challenge presented by climate change.
I don’t know, is this really true? Why? Are people going to get really hot and just start wars out of aggravation? Sort of like crazy road rage shootings that always seem to happen when cars stack up on the freeway in 100-degree heat? Hmmm, maybe they have something here.
"There can be no sustainable peace while military spending takes precedence over human development."
Ok – This one is flat out nuts. In the US we spend way more on human development than we do on military stuff. I mean add it up, Health and Human Services, Social Security, its way more. Try adding in what we spend on schools at the local and federal level and its like a zillion times what we spend on defense. Yet we are constantly blamed as being the most war like. Round numbers time – total Federal tax revenues are about two trillion dollars annually. Defense spending is about half a trillion annually. So even if we discount totally all non-federal spending on human social crap we are still at four to one. You want to try adding in what we all spend on schools and human services at the state and local level? Fuggetabout it. How can we then be blamed as being so warlike, which we always are, when we spend pretty much exactly as these people seem to want?
I don’t know, maybe I am jumping to conclusions. These people after all might in fact consider us the most peaceful nation in the world. We have been keeping the idiots in Europe from trying to kill each other for a good long time.
I wonder, since Betty Williams the Nobel Laureate is 64, that puts her birth date at 1942. I wonder how she would have felt if we had adopted the Neville Chamberlain/Joe Kennedy policy of non-violence toward Hitler? It sure would have been a lot easier than saving her country by entering the war in that year.
Source – The Australian - http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19902313-29677,00.html

A Little Less Restraint Please

Let’s take a little step back and look at what’s been going on in Israel the past few years.

1) Israel agrees to the Oslo accords – Arafat gets something like 95% of the land area he wanted. What happens? The Palestinians go nuts and terrorism increases.
2) We in America then go nuts and Clinton sends over James Carville to get Netanyahu, of Likud, thrown out and Ehud Barak, a moderate, elected. The Likud party wasn’t restrained enough for us I guess.
3) More terrorism.
4) Ariel Sharon gets elected; this guy is the father of the settlement program on the West Bank and Gaza. Guess the Israelis got tired of the restraint thing.
5) Sharon feels a need to exercise some restraint so he goes and forcibly evicts his own people from Gaza at gunpoint. Dismantling the settlements he established. You want to talk about restraint?
6) The Palestinians are so happy. The land they have wanted ceded back to them for years is now theirs. They start setting up rockets on the border, just to celebrate.
7) The Palestinians show us a different kind of restraint by electing Hamas, a terror organization, to be their leaders.
8) This new kind of restraint works so well (face it, terrorism got them Gaza) then lets have more of it! So, now we have these jerks taking Israeli soldiers hostage in Gaza and Lebanon

Ok – so can we be done with all these idiots urging restraint and proportional response? That means you “every major European country” and also you, the utterly useless UN, and you, Condoleza Rice.
Restraint has never gotten anyone anywhere when someone has been dead set on their destruction. Can the actions outlined above be interpreted any other way? At this point I would think the only restraint to be urged should be for the rest of the world to stop urging restraint. I would simply say Israel has clearly had an act of war perpetrated upon it and its time to let them fight that war and win. Enough already with the restraint.

Arrogance and Jimmy Carter – Truth Oracle

Recently I have been watching the flurry of news about the New York Times and several other papers revealing the tracking of banking information. I found the arrogance of the news papers absolutely astonishing. The Times admitted that not only could they find no evidence of abuse of the program, but also that it had actually been effective. Well, that’s just great. So what was the point in revealing it? Well, because there were “what if” concerns. In other words, this could be abused, so lets reveal it.

Well, that’s real genius reasoning as far as I am concerned and whenever the subject of genius comes up I tend to look to Jimmy Carter. Back in the Carter years we were constantly told of how he had the highest IQ of any president. If you are ever wondering what the correct moral or practical path is, for any given situation, ask yourself: What Would Jimmy Do? After making that determination, do exactly the opposite. You can then bask in the calm cool glow of knowing with virtual certainty you have done the right moral or practical thing.

As an example, lets just look at today’s column in the Washington Post by Mr. Carter. In it he bemoans that the US today has created 81% more secrets in 2005 than in 2000, citing as his source the “watchdog group” Openthegovernment.org. Obviously Mr. Carter tends to be the last to know about these things but I can only imagine how interesting it would be to inform him that we are currently engaged in a war, when we weren’t in 2000. Naturally one would expect more intelligence gathering during a war so hence more things classified as secrets.

He then goes on to cite how the great nations of South Africa and Jamaica are opening up their records to identify orphans, and bad land use planning. Gee, that’s really great. I suppose if one day the world starts depending upon Jamaica to be the policeman, instead of us, all that will have some meaning. Until then, so what?

Mr. Carter seems to pretty much want a world where nothing is hidden and everything is out in the open. That’s really a neat idea and it seems to be one the Times would endorse. Lets just get it out in the open and have no covert anything.

So, if you are wondering what to think of the Times revelations, or even what to think about Jimmy Carter, then consider this: there is a reason neither of the two are very good at helping the US win wars. Their unique abilities seem to lie in defeat. Jimmy Carter has relentlessly brought defeat through his arrogance. From North Korea, all the way back to Desert One. The Times is about to be a key player in whatever defeat we may suffer in our current engagement.