Paul Sheehan, Obama, that peace prize, and Jimmy Carter to blame for so much wrong in the world

(Above: quite possibly the reason that we now confront assorted jihads).

In space no one can hear you scream ... but on the intertubes ...

Is Sheehan some kind of cretin? I mean from his first two pars you think that the Bush years never happened and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars dropped fully formed from the trees. The man is a joke.

Yep, it's the frothy and foaming commentary section attached to Paul Sheehan's standard Monday rant, under the ever so predictable header Peace prize becomes a travesty.

Here's those first two pars, which sees Sheehan return from his duties as ecstatic foodie bread buff to savager of Democrats:

Long before the Nobel Peace Prize was debased and trivialised into an episode of American Idol, the failure beneath the soaring rhetoric of Barack Obama had been exposed. Even the secretary of the Nobel committee sheepishly admitted on Friday: ''Nominations for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize closed just 11 days after he [Obama] took office.''

Since then, the US President has knowingly propped up a corrupt and violent regime in Afghanistan led by a lying fraud. He has achieved nothing to prevent the continued building of Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank. To hand the Nobel prize to someone whose credentials are in the potential rather than the execution confirms that the prize has degenerated into a beauty pageant.

Gee I don't know why Patrickb from Perth got so upset. After all, Obama's just propping up a corrupt and violent regime installed by (-), after a war organized by (-) that ran way over time while (-) organized another war in Iraq, which turned into yet another (-) debacle, and now Obama can either tough it out and get deeper into the mess set up by (-) or he can try to scale back, chicken out, cut and run, surrender, and then spend the rest of the century being celebrated by hard hats as a loser and a quitter and someone who hates America (and if you're telling me we lost in 'Nam, how'd you like your face given a good taste of the long end of a baseball bat?)

Um, actually it was in 1973 that Henry A. Kissinger shared the gong with Le Duc Tho, and surely he got the award for his good looks rather than his abilities as a cheesemaker. Talk about the funny ways of a beauty pageant.

But hey ho, on we go:

Three times in the past eight years the starry-eyed progressives who run the prize have given it to leaders of the US Democratic Party - Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and now Obama. One of them, Carter, actively sowed the seeds of what would become a global jihad.

Remember the starry-eyed progressives are very different from the starry-eyed (-), whose name can never be mentioned. Let us try not to speak of (-) again, as indeed Sheehan manages throughout the entirety of his vituperative column. On Afghanistan!

Poor Jimmy Carter. I mean, apart from being a peanut farmer and a one term President, he's done so much in the world. Sowed the seeds of global jihad, sowed the seeds of the recent meltdown commonly known as the GFC, and no doubt sowed the seeds for global warming, the GM seeds of (-)'s reign, and perhaps even the seeds for the end of western civilization as we know it.

It's hard work for a man with only four years in meandering power, but it's great he rose to the challenge.

Oh and where's (-) on Sheehan's list of knaves celebrated by the Nobel prize ponces, still trying to extinguish the founder's guilt about making a fortune from dynamite? Well he hasn't collected any gongs at all from those knavish Europeans, yet as Kissinger showed, carpet bombing a country surely puts you up as a front runner for a peace prize. But only now has it become a travesty ...!

Back in 2005, Sheehan could see some point to the war in Afghanistan:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban government which imposed a medievalism that shackled women, brutalised dissent, suffocated freedom and sponsored bin Laden's mercenaries was routed by military intervention. A painful national reconstruction continues. (Murder of innocents a lost cause).

But there's not much point playing the 'gotcha' game with Sheehan, because he's as variable as a zephyr, as inclined to fluctuate through the seasons as Melbourne is in a day. The curmudgeonly grumpiness is consistent, but the targets are whatever ails him at any particular spot in time.

One moment he might be in terror of global warming, the next dismiss it as a myth. At one moment, he might fear and dislike war, and the next he might be singing the efficacy of bombing the shit out of jihadists to the high heavens.

So never mind that the Nobel peace prize has always been inclined to the silly, or to miss - in the way of many literary awards - the best going around, in favor of the trendy most on view.

No, because suddenly Sheehan - courtesy of George Packer in The New Yorker - has discovered that Afghanistan is a mess and the Karzai government is full of corrupt no-hopers, though I'm wondering if he's referring to Packer's podcast (here) or Packer taking a look at what the generals are reading (here), or his full piece on Richard Holbrooke's plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan (here), available in full under the header The Last Mission, or perhaps even Coll on Packer on Holbrooke under the header Gorbachev was right.

Part of the SMH's slack, paranoid refusal to indulge in links - perhaps on the principle that once you leave Sheehan's page you might never come back - is that not only are they refusing to acknowledge appropriately the works they exploit and reference (come on down Chairman Rupert and give them a spray), but the misrepresentations of Packer's work by Sheehan aren't so easily followed up.

Never mind, Sheehan is indignant about the corrupt useless election - an indignation which would have been just as appropriate and a lot more relevant back in August - as well as the fate of women in Afghanistan, again something he could have got more excited about way back when Karzai was passing his fundamentalist and oppressive laws regarding women to barely a squawk from the mainstream media (it was only those damn pesky feminists getting excited again. Yawn, enough of teh feminists already).

Never mind, Sheehan is really agitated most of all about Afghanistan as a way of establishing that Obama doesn't deserve a peace gong, and it's all the fault of lefties:

The person most responsible for the Nobel committee's sycophancy is the chairman of the five-member committee, Thorbjoern Jagland, 58, a former prime minister of Norway with a long history of left-wing politics. Now he can meet his political hero. The juxtaposition of white-tie glamour and real-world squalor surpasses irony.

Hang on, I thought it was being trivialized into an episode of American Idol? Now it seems it's being trivialized into an episode of leftie Norwegian Idol?

Well given the timeline for the nomination process, it's a fair bet that Obama got the nod for simply not being George Bush and hopefully offering a new direction regarding the way the world conducts its affairs, especially the United States.

And that's hardly a sound basis for handing out a gong, especially as he's now stuck in a war in Afghanistan that's going from bad to worse. But it's very cheeky for Sheehan to pin the tail of that particular donkey right on Obama's behind, as if there haven't been many donkeys over many years on the question of Afghanistan, including Sheehan. (And here perhaps for the last time we should remember that it was really Jimmy Carter that sowed those jihadist seeds, when he couldn't even see that the seeds were different from peanut seeds).

Yep, if you read Sheehan, Afghanistan seems to have had nothing to do with (-), and you get the impression of the outburst of sore loser squawking about Obama - who didn't ask for the award, lobby for it or expect to get the gong - that if there was any justice in the world, (-) should be given some kind of consolation prize as a colossus of cheese-making.

About the only benefit I could see in that outcome would be that lefties could write a line about (-) which might run something like: "The juxtaposition of white-tie glamour and real-world squalor surpasses irony."

A bit like the way Paddington ponces rhapsodizing about fifteen bucks for a loaf of bread amongst real-world squalor surpasses irony?

And in the end what's it matter? Does anyone think that the best picture awards handed out each year at the Academy Awards celebrates the best picture (if you can narrow hundreds of films down to one)? Should the United States feel pleased it elected a president the world has responded to with hope and awards? If you've got a beef with the prize, take it up with the Nobel peace prize committee, and leave Obama out of it.

Certainly not! Not when he can be blamed for all that's wrong with Afghanistan (except those many bits we must pin on Jimmy Carter), as well as being given an award!

Ah well, never mind. The cruelest howl in space?

I am outraged. Obama gets the Nobel yet Miracle Water yet again misses out on the medicine and chemistry awards. A travesty.

My own thought? Given the obstruction and downright hatred Obama has faced in his first year, a pink elephant stamp is both a good thing and a curse, because the spoilsports will use it as just another way to vent their hatred, envy and anger. Like Paul Sheehan. While conveniently overlooking how the world went to hell in a hand basket during the previous eight years.

My other thought? Go read Packer in The New Yorker. He's not into shit stirring and mindless simplifications, as Sheehan is ... and his suggestion that Obama should have turned the prize down makes an interesting if unconvincing read ... since that kind of snub would just have led to the same amount of boiling water in which Obama could stew at his leisure.

Even so, he's always an interesting read ... much more interesting than a donkey trying to pin the tail on a man who whatever he might be, is no donkey.

Who knows, you might never read another Paul Sheehan column again, and as well as improving your blood pressure, it just might improve your understanding of the world ...

(And here's the link to Packer's short piece Beware Premature Prizes).

(Below: a visual impression of a Paul Sheehan column).