The Ignobel

I have been cooking like a mad fiend today, along with many others in the nation - those of us lucky enough to have homes, food and family to share Thanksgiving dinner with. The news inside my family circle is good. The news outside in the world makes me crazy.

If you read my previous post, you will see that I have been holding on to a thin thread of hope that this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, that would be President Obama, would follow the path of peace and decline to send more troops to Afghanistan. That thin thread has all but snapped with the news of his speech at West Point Tuesday night in which he will reveal his strategy for Afghanistan. As I said previously, he is a man who never does something politically unstrategic, so the revelation of his "strategy" at one of the military academies says it all, I believe. The pundits are all saying that he will focus on his exit strategy, and again, I say that you don't have to be a genius to understand that he's going to couch this in a way that will attempt to make this sound good to the American public, which is becoming more and more negative about this "good war."

It will be interesting to see what the Congress does re: funding more troops. That is the only place I see where the plan might run into trouble. Commentators have said that it will cost anywhere from 1/2 a million to 1 million dollars PER TROOP to send more soldiers over. You do the math on 30,000 troops, the number that has been batted around in the press today.

On the same page in today's Globe, screams the headline "President won't sign treaty to ban land mines." This I find positively sickening. This places us with the following countries which have refused to sign: China, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Russia. Do we think it's a good thing that land mines remain planted in at least 70 countries and kill or maim 5,000 people per year? Did he not sign this treaty because we will want to plant land mines ourselves possibly in the Afghan region? I find it hard to reconcile the fact that the Nobel Prize for Peace was given to Jody Williams in 1997 for the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, yet in 2009, it is given to President Obama, who, like President Bush before him, refuses to sign on to the Treaty.

Just what are the qualifications for being a Nobel Peace Prize winner? How can the President in good conscience accept the award? And is the Committee squirming? My father would have said to me "You can't know what's going on behind the scenes. They (those in authority) know what they're doing." That was his famous quote to me about Nixon and Vietnam. Well I say, we questioned authority then and we should be questioning authority now. The Nobel citation isn't worth the paper it's printed on.