Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...