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The problem with the new math in today's political discourse

My friends at Delawareliberal went all out describing Americans who did not believe that President Barack Obama did not deserve the Nobel Peace prize as wingnuts with no fewer than nine major posts.

The general theme was possibly best expressed by Delawaredem, who opined that when you have President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, you have the recipe for Peak Wingnut.

The only problem, CNN now reports, is that a majority of Americans (which would require a lot of Democrats to make up that majority, one presumes) don't think President Obama deserved the Nobel Peace prize:

About a third believe the president deserved the prize, according to this week's CNN/Opinion Research poll. Fifty-six percent say they disapprove of the Nobel Prize Committee's decision to honor him, the survey found.


This would appear to mean one of three things:

1) Americans in general reality test much better than our local liberal/progressive bloggers, and realize that the primary reason President Obama won the Nobel is because he is not George W. Bush.

2) GOP rhetoric is a lot more effective than they thought in influencing public opinion.

3) Polling only means something when it concludes what you wanted to believe in the first place.

Come to think of it: maybe it means all three things at the same time.

And maybe, just maybe, we will start to see some of President Obama's supporters begin to pay more careful attention to his increasingly ineffective while increasingly interventionist foreign policy.

Nah. Probably not going to happen.

Comments

Delaware Watch said…
"And maybe, just maybe, we will start to see some of President Obama's supporters begin to pay more careful attention to his increasingly ineffective while increasingly interventionist foreign policy."

It might help if we saw some convincing evidence for your claim. And I definitely mean something more convincing than this strained contrivance:

http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/10/continuing-militarization-of-american.html
Anonymous said…
The ignorance of the majority of Americans has been documented many many times.

I'd bet my house that over 80% of Americans couldn't name 5 other living Nobel Peace Prize winners. So what if 56% don't think he deserved it? You also conveniently left out that the same poll also found that "almost 70 percent saying they are proud an American president won it."

What you're missing is that most Americans celebrate when Americans are honored on the international stage and don't cheer and celebrate when America loses, like the republicans do.

Who can forget them cheering at their convention last year after the film celebrating the attacks on 9/11/01? Or cheering the selection of another country for the Olympics? Or thinking that Sarah Palin deserved being nominated for Vice President?

A post like this one is sheer demagoguery and you know it. And I write that as one who does not personally believe Obama deserved the award but am glad that he won it, nevertheless. I hope that it impacts his conscience and his actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the use of force in general.

anonone
Nancy Willing said…
I imagine that Americans think that the Peace Prize is supposed to only represent peace achieved. In the words of the committee, it has always recognized efforts towards increasing the potential of peace.

To the rest of the world, Bushco was so frightful, literally, that the Nobel is mostly an endorsement of American's choice of new leadership in someone who expressed the polar opposite of the horrors that had come before.

The main question is: who deserved it more? The Tibetan dissidents?

The Nobel is a symbol. I am sure glad they didn't give it to freakin' Bill Clinton.

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