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