So Barack Obama just picked up the imprimatur and nihil obstat from Oslo’s Nobel Prize Committee for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.”

Yes, that’s right, this year’s Nobel “Peace” Prize goes to Barack Obama. What’s the appropriate response: incredulity? Nah: the Nobel Peace Prize is a thoroughly discredited politically-correct coefficient of liberal transnational socialism. Barack Obama was tailor-made for this dubious honor, just as Yasser Arafat was. No, the appropriate response should be a compound of contempt and irritation, contempt for the bloviating Norwegians who once again have distinguished themselves by their sanctimonious fatuousness (”Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future . . . .”), irritation at the fact that this pseudo distinction will, in the eyes of the credulous, tend to legitimate the actions of the most anti-American and incompetent President in history.

The Times (no, not The New York Times, which is purring with pleasure at the news, but the London Times) is correct:

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

Bottom line: this action is less the awarding of a prize than a kick in the teeth aimed at traditional American power and prestige.

As usual, Andy McCarthy cuts to the chase:

I’m not all for Americans winning international prizes, especially the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, I’m vigorously against it. The transnational progressives who pass out these accolades believe America is the problem in the world, the main threat to peace, the impediment to “progress,” etc. The award is a symbolic statement of opposition to American exceptionalism, American might, American capitalism, American self-determinism, and American pursuit of America’s interests in the world.

Exactly. If you are pro-American, you must be anti-the Nobel Peace. I am pro-American, ergo, etc. And Andy is to be commended, too, for his suggestion that we rebaptize this discreditable faux-honor with a more suitable name:

After a number of years, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy after its most fitting recipient — it’s now called the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I’d like to see the Nobel Foundation follow suit. If today’s headlines said, “Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize,” that would be perfect.

[UPDATE: a friend reminds me that this year's Nobel Peace Laureate, B. Obama, has just refused to meet last year's Nobel Peace Laureate, the Dalai Lama: what do you make of that?]

Over at The Weekly Standard blog, Bill Kristol has a short but deadly post on Obama’s dithering non-policy about the war in Afghanistan. Bill reports that at a recent meeting with Congressional leaders, Obama gravely pointed out that every thousand troops sent to Afghanistan would cost about a billion dollars a year. A billion dollars a year! Call Senator Dirksen. Would they, Obama is said to have queried the Congressmen, would they really be prepared to support $40 or $50 billion in additional spending?

Rich, what? Or rather, poor. I mean, here’s the $12 trillion President fretting — that is, pretending to fret — over $40 or $50 billion. That’s school lunch money for the Democrats.

Of course, the issue isn’t money. It’s morality. That’s to say, it’s about what really matters to Obama. He’s willing to demand $800 billion now, today, to shore up his support among the auto unions and other Democratic interest groups. But the war of terror? He can’t even bring himself to pronounce the phrase. Indeed, one of the first things he did upon assuming office was to rebaptize the war on terror “overseas contingency operations.” (No, I am not making that up.)

Barack Obama traipses around the world, apologizing for America, telling the IOC all about himself and why the 2016 Olympics should come to his dysfunctional home town, coddling dictators. Even the French are appalled: Nicolas Sarkozy has made no secret of his exasperation at Obama’s naive and immature multicultural posturing.

Meanwhile the bad guys — and the world contains many really, really bad guys — are swelling with anticipation and feeling their oats. Ronald Reagan made no bones about calling the Soviet Union “the evil empire.” George W. Bush described North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as an axis of evil and promised to “smoke out” terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Barack Obama doesn’t know what to do. When it comes to the world stage, he is like a babe in the woods. It reminds me of a comment made by a well-meaning liberal who attended a dinner for the distinguished writer David Pryce-Jones in New York a week or so ago. Aghast that those around the table should be criticizing the Europeanization of the United States, he delivered himself of a few potted words lambasting Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and the war on terror. What we should have done after 9/11, he said, was to have spent some of those billions of dollars we spent prosecuting a war in Iraq on bringing our enemies to the United States and educating them about our way of life. Then they would come to understand and love us. I thought of Dostoevsky’s observation in Notes from the Underground:

Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else. . . . Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!

What was the most nauseating display of politically correct pap you have witnessed lately? My candidate, hands down, was the “I Pledge” video in which a gaggle of celebrities moonlight as part of Barack Obama’s public relations team.

Oscar Wilde said that a man had to have a heart of stone to read Dickens’s account of the death of little Nell without laughing. Similarly, you have to have nerves of steel not to burst out laughing at this pompous group of self-satisfied narcissists preening before the camera to the strains of pseudo Aaron Copeland pledging “to help end hunger in America,” “to be the voice for those that have no voice,” “to show more love to strangers,” “to reduce my use of plastic,” and — above all — “to be of service to Barack Obama,” “to be a servant to our President and all mankind,” because, after all, being President is “the loneliest job in the world.”

Yes, it’s funny, alright, in a gruesome sort of way, but most sane people will also feel a twinge of nausea as they guffaw at these preposterous people lining up to pay obeisance to the most politically correct, multicultural, apologetic President in history. I mean, really: watching Demi Moore pledge “to be a servant to our President and all mankind” is something that should come come with some sort of Surgeon General’s warning, no? And who was that horrible betattooed chap who kissed his biceps, one after the other, as he reverently pronounced the names “Barack” and “Obama”?

[UPDATE: A fellow cultural pathologist calls my attention to this emetic specimen at the Huffington Post. Your life will not be complete until you watch it, too.]

Well, fans, relief is at hand. For some clever and stylish folks have made two perfect send ups of the most recent stomach-churning performance. They prove that the art of satire is not dead and that ridicule is among the last best hopes for man. “We need to let Big government run our health care,” says one of the actors, “just like the Post Office, the IRS, and the DMV.” “When your child needs surgery,” says another, “is it really the time for hasty decisions? With Big Government in charge, you’ll have a few months to think it over. Emergency surgery? No thanks! Emergencies are too scary.” Says a bemused fellow: “Make my own health care decisions? . . . Why?”

Click and enjoy:

Most ordinary Americans, I suspect, started tuning out the “debate” over changing the way America delivers and pays for health care weeks if not months ago.

Why the scare quotes around “debate”? Here’s a hastily made, but not inaccurate, transcription of a typical exchange:

“Did.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

And so on. Regular readers know that I am deeply skeptical about the Democrats’ plans for “reforming” health care. (Why the scare quotes around “reforming”? If you don’t know the answer to that, please turn off your computer now and read George Orwell on “Politics and the English Language.”) But I, too, am weary of the tu-quoque quality of this words-words-words substitute for debate. No one, it seems, manages much traction, however sharp his arguments and observations. Camp A never seems to get a foot into the hearts and minds of Camp B, and vice-versa.

In this situation, it seems wise to turn to the real experts — not the Ph.Ds. and pundits and policy wonks. No, they’re responsible for the miasma of tedium that has settled over the subject of “health care ‘reform’” like a narcotic draught. I mean our society’s real sources of wisdom and enlightenment, our celebrities. What do they have to say about ObamaCare?

A friend sent me a list of celebrities who supported Obama’s plan to nationalize health care. What do they have to say on the subject? Here’s the list:

Patrick Swayze
Michael Jackson
John Hughes
Farrah Fawcett
Walter Cronkite
David Carradine
Bea Arthur
Senator Edward Kennedy
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
“DJ AM”
Natasha Richardson
Karl Malden
Billy Mays
Steve McNair
Les Paul

Oh dear. None of them can be contacted for comment. Does it matter? I mean, is it relevant? In the case of some, they had just come to the end of a long road. Michael Jackson seems to have drugged himself, or was drugged, to death. But poor Natasha Richardson, had she been skiing in Aspen instead of Vancouver, would likely be alive today. Her cerebral hematoma was “very treatable,” one US neurosurgeon observed, only you have actually to apply the treatment, not wait for 4 hours before admitting the patient to the hospital. That would almost certainly have happened in the U.S. as its health care is currently structured. In Canada, waiting is business as usual. No matter what side of the debate one is on, you know that if the Democrats get their way, the delivery of medicare care in the America will become more like its counterpart in Canada and Great Britain. Do we really want that? Ask Natasha Richardson.

This from the editorial page of The New York Times today:

Mr. Obama’s Promise of Transparency

Hopes for an effective law that would protect the public’s access to essential news from inside government have been dealt a severe setback by the Obama administration.

Uh-oh. And there’s more:

The latest hedging from the White House does not deliver on his promise for a new era of openness.

Gee whiz, guys, do you really think so? And it’s not just the editorial pages of our former paper of record that has been, however briefly, roused from its dogmatic slumbers. There is also “Old Reliable” Frank Rich who only yesterday was lamenting that

We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers [that would be Obama;s Demoratic lobbyists] seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay.

As Glenn Reynolds commented, “When you’ve lost Frank Rich, you’ve lost conventional-wisdom punditAmerica.”

More and more liberals are feeling it: Buyer’s remorse!

Trial lawyers getting you down? Disgusted at the huge settlements they win, supposedly on behalf of the little guy, really for the sake of lining their bulging pockets with a third of whatever the insurance companies are made to fork over?

No, I don’t have a solution, other than to say if wishes were horses there would be an immediate cap on settlements and lawyers would have to make due with a much smaller contingency fee. But I do have, courtesy of a public-spirited friend, a simple, painless way to cause at least some law firms a modicum of inconvenience and expense.

You know those ads on Google? You search for “Peach Pie,” say, and running down the right side of the screen are a bunch of ads for recipes, peaches, and what not. All of those ads are paid notices. Every time someone clicks on them, Google gets a sum — quite a substantial sum, I understand, in the case of the ones near the top.

So here’s what you do. Search for something like “asbestos” or “mesothelioma” (an icky lung disease caused by exposure to asbestos) and up will pop a zillion articles about it and , along the right side, a bunch of ads for law firms angling for your business. Have a spare moment? Click on the top several. Do it more than once. Every time you click, they pay. No, it won’t make them go away, but it will register your irritation and, besides, anything that causes the trial lawyers inconvenience should be regarded as a public-spirited act. So go ahead: occupy an idle moment charging the trial lawyers. You’ll be glad you did. And encourage your friends to do likewise.

By the way, readers wanting to educate themselves about the costs and absurdities of our overly litigious society should be sure to check out the excellent web site overlawyered.com which, as its tagline puts it, chronicles “the high cost of our legal system.” After you peruse some of the articles there, you’ll probably come back to “mesothelioma” on Google and click a bunch more ads.

Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts is a B-list prep school, old enough and rich enough to merit the appellation “elite,” but academically a cut (or two) below such first-rank institutions as Deerfield, Exeter, and Andover. If you have a spare $44,000 and you wish to unload Junior for grades 9-12, I suppose you might consider Cushing an option.

If you care about Junior’s education, however, you’ll want to think twice about sending him (or her) to Cushing. Why? Well, despite boasting all of the accoutrements of a traditional prep school, Cushing has decdied to embrace the Brave New World of educational trendiness and dispense with its library and the contents thereof.

This was one of those eye-rubbing announcements that sparks a double response: incredulity, first, followed closely by outrage and contempt. The October issue of The New Criterion has a note on the subject.

Thomas Parkman Cushing, who originally endowed the school, was careful to stipulate that it be provided, in addition to other accoutrements befitting an educational establishment, with a “suitable library.” James Tracy, the current headmaster, finds the whole idea of a library, and the objects they traditionally contain, positively quaint. Speaking to The Boston Globe, he actually said, apparently without embarrassment, “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.”

Where, I wonder, were Cushing’s Trustees when their school was being vandalized? Were they happy to sit back and watch as the intellectual center of the institution was eviscerated? How’s that for leadership?

The Globe reports that Cushing is “one of the first schools in the country to abandon its books.” Is this embrace of the new illiteracy a trend, for heaven’s sake?

The story seems straight out of the pages of some third-rate satire: “In pursuit of a ‘bookless campus,’” The New Criterion reports,

Cushing is disburdening itself of its library’s 20,000 books and spending $500,000 to establish a “learning center” — the name, the Globe reports, is tentative, but whatever they settle on you can be sure the scare quotes will be appropriate. Of course, once you dump a library’s books, you have a lot of extra space to fill, so Cushing . . . will be spending $42,000 for some large flat-screen monitors to display data from the Internet as well as $20,000 for “laptop-friendly” study carrels. In place of the reference desk, the Globe reports, Cushing is building “a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.”

The cappuccino machine is a nice touch, I think you’ll agree. Here’s the bottom line:

at a moment when American students are positively inundated with various forms of electronic media competing for, and eroding, their attention, an institution entrusted with (in Thomas Cushing’s words) “strengthening and enlarging the minds of the rising and future generations” decides to jettison one of civilization’s most potent aids in furthering that project. Fifty grand per annum for a school without books.

You really can’t make it up.

A few days ago, I attended a small lunch for Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist whose image of Mohammed with a bomb for a turban is the most famous of the so-called “Danish cartoons” that occasioned one of those periodic paroxysms of rage, mayhem, and murder among followers of the religion of peace.

The lunch was off-the-record, so I’ll just say that Mr. Westergaard, now 74, is a gentle, soft-spoken fellow with a wry sense of humor. I liked his definition of a cartoon as “an idea with a line around it.” He was on his way the next day to Branford College at Yale, where he spoke before some 65 Yale students and faculty. You won’t be surprised to hear that Mr. Westergaard deplored Yale’s decision to censor Jytte Klausen’s book The Cartoons that Shook the World by forbidding at the last moment publication of the cartoons and other artistic representations of Mohammed.

Rabbi Jon Hausman was at the event and, guess what, the “Yale community” was the opposite of welcoming.

“The crowd was hostile, Rabbi Hausman reported in an interview.

There were a number of self-described Muslims. Those who did ask questions expressed displeasure with Westergaard’s work. The questions from these people were repetitive. One person described himself as a mildly Evangelical Christian who lived for a number of years in a Muslim country working. Yet, he took what I call a dhimmi view in his question — how far can Westergaard go in his work before endangering Christians who live in Muslim countries? I found this to be the most disturbing question and attitude of all.

Asked for his overall impression of Yale, Rabbi Hausman was blunt:

Honestly, I would not send my child to any school where there is such uniformity and conformity of thought and attitude. I was disappointed at the inability of those in attendance amongst the Yale community to place responsibility for the violence that has transpired on those who manifest such responsibility. Westergaard drew, but it was the Imams from Denmark who took those cartoons one year after publication and whipped up violent frenzies, destruction of Danish Embassies in the Muslim world, threats to the physical safety of Danish personnel, violence against indigenous Christian populations. Every questioner seemed to want to misplace blame.

Further, it is clear that the university suffers from the malaise of relativist truth and the multicultural ethic. There are no universal truths any longer. When I was in college, it seemed that the point of education at the university level was to use the subject matter under study to encourage independent, critical thinking. Today, all truths are equal. I abjure this notion.

In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.

That sums it up neatly, doesn’t it?

Andrew Breitbart is a national hero. Not only was he the impresario who brought the exposure of ACORN by filmmaker James O’Keefe and actress Hannah Giles to public attention, but he has just followed it up with a blistering exposé of how the White House has endeavored to use the National Endowment for the Arts as a propaganda arm for its left-wing agenda on health care, the environment, education, and “community renewal.”

Today, Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com posts the transcript of an August 10 conference call between Yosi Sergant, then director of communication at the NEA, Buffy Wicks, from the deliciously named Office of Public Engagement at the White House, and a score of artists and activists.

It is an amazing document, breathtaking and alarming by turns. I knew that the Obama administration was moving fast to socialize the United States. I had no idea that its efforts at enforcing conformity through propaganda had reached such an advanced stage.

Here are a few snippets from that conference, stitched together to bring out the gist of various points (though I have not tidied up the diction).

Mike Skolnick, a filmmaker who now serves as “political director” for Russell Simmons, the vegan proselytizer and hip-hop entrepreneur, started the ball rolling. “I have been asked,” he said:

… by folks in the White House and folks in the NEA [to follow up on] the role that we artists and thinkers and tastemakers and marketers and visionaries played during the campaign for the president and also during the his first 200 some odd days of his presidency. … I’m hoping that through this group … we can … get involved in things that we’re passionate about as we did during the campaign … to support some of the president’s initiatives … and push the president and push his administration.

Why was Mr. Skolnick asked by “folks in the White House” to help get artists to “support the president’s initiatives” and “push his administration”?

What is going on here?

Then we have Buffy Wicks — former Obama campaign activist, now White House enabler:

We won and that’s exciting and now we have to take all that energy and make it really meaningful. I’m in the White House now and what I’ve learned is that … change doesn’t come easy, but now that I’m actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda, I’m really realizing that
… we’re going to need your help, and we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here.

We wanted folks to connect with local nonprofit organizations in their community. We wanted them to connect with local city council members or local elected officials. We wanted them to connect with federal agencies, with labor unions, progressive groups, face groups, women’s groups, you name it.

Well, were I called upon to “name it,” I’d say it was a blatant misuse of executive power for the purposes of political indoctrination and partisan propaganda.

I just heard the sad news that Irving Kristol, “the godfather of Neoconservatism,” died today. I will have more to say about this remarkable man elsewhere, but I wanted to take a moment now to register my sorrow at the passing of a friend whom I greatly admired and a man whose intellectual labors did so much to preserve and nurture the vital traditions of American conservatism. Irving was a man of remarkable literary and political judgment. He was also a draught of good cheer. I never saw him without a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. He positively radiated benignity.

Editor, essayist, instigator of numberless intellectual initiatives (including The New Criterion, which Irving helped to start), he possessed in a very high degree two complementary gifts. He had an uncanny knack for ferreting out talent in others. He was a superb editor, by which I do not just mean that he was a dab hand at strengthening your prose, but also–a much rarer gift — that he was a dab hand at strengthening your ideas. He instantly saw what was at stake in a controversy or battle of ideas, and he’d quietly, cheerfully help his writers seize that golden core.

That instinct for the pertinent was something his own writing exhibited with unfailing clarity. Most of Irving’s essays were quite short — an exception was a superlative, and lengthy, reflection on Tacitus and nihilism first published in Encounter, the English monthly that Irving edited in the 1950s with Stephen Spender. His favored form, though, was the literary surgical strike. Irving could pack an extraordinary amount in 1200 – 1500 words. Whether the topic was the welfare state, foreign policy, the totalitarian temptation, or the terrible legacy of the 1960s, Irving always articulated exactly what was at stake in the subject under discussion. He was a practical man, consummately attuned to what, for lack of a more elegant term, I will call the “policy implications” of ideas. But he saw with unusual perspicacity that ideas mattered. In a 1973 essay called “On Capitalism and the Democratic Idea,” he put it thus:

For two centuries, the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas — until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society — the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions — are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will — perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably — twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

Well put, is it not? And how often we need to remind ourselves of that weighty moral.

Probably Irving’s most frequently quoted mot concerned neoconservatism, the intellectual-political movement with which he is indelibly identified. “A neo-conservative,” he said, “is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” That was the great gift Irving gave to his, to our, generation: an unforgettable reminder that ideas mattered because of the realities they nurtured or discouraged. He saw with a kindly but unflinching clarity what mischief the seductive lullabies of utopian fantasy had prepared for its acolytes. His passing is a sad loss not only to conservatives to but also to the nation: those eloquent reminders seem fewer and farther between these days, yet are ever more needful. RIP.