Former Nobel director regrets giving President Obama Nobel Peace Prize

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**Gwaihirsbrother**

The name evokes religion not race for me anyway. Hussein is not a black name so much as an Islamic name. Not a fan of using it and I really don't like his policies. I recall often hearing other presidents middle names being used frequently though clearly some uses of the current president's middle name are made to evoke images of and connect him to radical Islam.

**cincydooley**

Psienesis wrote:
[. because he's a white man.

Ted Cruz is white?

Yeah. No.

Unless we're using the George Zimmerman White Hispanic phraseology here.

**Psienesis**

Latinos are "white", though there are definitely aspects of American society who wish they weren't. They're of European descent (Spain, primarily) following interbreeding with (and later extermination of) the native populations of the New World, especially in the Caribbean and Central/South America.

**Relapse**

Seriously, if a family is in this country for a couple or three generations, they more than likely aren't going to be pure blood anything. Not White, Not Black, or any other race.
I have had co workers who were "Black" tell me that speakers from Africa who came to their college would tell them that they are not Black, but Americans.
One friend of mine who was so called Black got into looking up family geneology with a friend who lived across the street and was emabarassed to find out his family owned some his bud's ancestors.

**Psienesis**

If we're rating "generations" by children born in the country, then Ted Cruz isn't even a first-generation American, he was born in Canada. Again, though, people aren't asking after his birth certificate.

**Relapse**

Seems like you have an itch to scratch in another thread you could open instead of derailing this one.

**Vaktathi**

Relapse wrote:
Seriously, if a family is in this country for a couple or three generations, they more than likely aren't going to be pure blood anything. Not White, Not Black, or any other race.
I have had co workers who were "Black" tell me that speakers from Africa who came to their college would tell them that they are not Black, but Americans.

Aye, we had to have a special "heads up" notice on this when I went to South Africa in that what is considered "Black" in America will not necessarily be viewed the same way, and the "American" thing would hold very true, and that unlike the relatively monolithic American "Black", differentiations were made on one being Xhosa or Zulu and the like .

**Ouze**

As much of a human dumpster fire as Ted Cruz is, I agree with Relapse, you should put that in the political junkie thread.

**Ahtman**

Vaktathi wrote:
Relapse wrote:
Seriously, if a family is in this country for a couple or three generations, they more than likely aren't going to be pure blood anything. Not White, Not Black, or any other race.
I have had co workers who were "Black" tell me that speakers from Africa who came to their college would tell them that they are not Black, but Americans.
Aye, we had to have a special "heads up" notice on this when I went to South Africa in that what is considered "Black" in America will not necessarily be viewed the same way, and the "American" thing would hold very true, and that unlike the relatively monolithic American "Black", differentiations were made on one being Xhosa or Zulu and the like .

Next you will tell us that they call Soccer 'Football' in Europe and South America. Both have the distinction of being common knowledge that means nothing within the borders of the US. Saying someone isn't considered Black in Africa doesn't change that they are considered Black here, just as we still call the game Soccer even if it is called something somewhere else.

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Psienesis wrote:
following interbreeding with (and later extermination of) the native populations of the New World, especially in the Caribbean and Central/South America.

In North America one of the most common jokes I heard among Native Americans is how sexually active they must be, or have been, since almost everyone claims ancestry with them.

**d-usa**

Vaktathi wrote:
Experiment 626 wrote:
Ghazkuul wrote:
I rank President Obama in the same company I put Truman and Wilson. But for completely different reasons

Wilson and Truman are rated as some of the worst presidents in my book for their willingness to throw America into wars that we WEREN'T prepared for. Wilson allowed the US to join WW1 without first preparing our country in anyway beyond simply starting a draft.

Truman, after WWII GUTTED the US military, the old line from back then is "The Buck Stops here" and "Cutting away the fat from the military" and the popular line from the military was "Cutting to the bone". Truman was completely unprepared for the spread of communism and the Korean war. When we officially went to war with North Korea the 1st Marine division consisted of a single Infantry Regiment that was at around 1/2 wartime strength. The first year of the war saw the US army getting slaughtered due to poor equipment, poor training and being undermanned.

Obama has forced Obamacare down our throats, Cut Military benefits (Not funding, just benefits), attempted to ruin our relationship with Israel and has been a global apologist. I still remember his Cairo speech to this day. Not to mention has caused several stop gaps, government shut downs and is currently pushing for us to accept the Iran/Nuclear deal.

He's also killed the Keystone XL pipeline, and the thousands of well paying jobs that goes along with it, simply to vote-pander to the idiot green brigade.
Hrm, the overwhelmingly vast majority of those would have been temporary construction gigs and nebulous "incidental" jobs (e.g. recreation, food, etc).

The actual number of long term jobs the Keystone XL pipeline would have created would be negligible. Pipelines just don't employ thousands of people.

There's all sorts of reasons to build a pipeline, but if the only reason people are upset is the jobs issue, I can think of a whole lot more effective jobs programs.

How much money would anyone actually want to pump into a pipeline with oil the price it is right now anyway. He probably saved those companies from going broke!

**motyak**

Oil pipeline jobs =/= Nobel Peace Prize. The topic, find it

**Jihadin**

Cordell Hull, 1945: Hull, a US politician, was given the prize for his role in establishing the United Nations. He is a controversial winner, says Time, because of an incident in 1939 when he was President Roosevelt's Secretary of State. The President was amenable to helping 950 Jewish refugees aboard a ship called the SS St Louis settle in America. But Hull and a group of Democrats from the American South voiced "strong opposition", threatening to withdraw support for Roosevelt if he let the ship dock. The president buckled, the SS St Louis was turned around and many of its passengers became victims of the Holocaust.

Henry Kissinger, 1973: When President Nixon's Secretary of State was handed the prize in 1973, American satirist Tom Lehrer observed that political satire was dead. Kissinger was a joint winner of the prize alongside North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho. Both men had help broker a ceasefire in the Vietnam war, but Le Duc Tho turned the honour down saying peace had not yet been restored in South Vietnam. Kissinger accepted the award "with humility". Kissinger's critics point out that the US was still carpet-bombing Cambodia the year he picked up the prize. He's also been accused of war crimes, thanks, in part, to America's provision of arms and support to the South American dictators who carried out Operation Condor, an anti-communist campaign of repression and terror that claimed the lives of thousands of people.

Yasser Arafat, 1994: One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Arafat, who led the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) for three decades, was handed the award alongside Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and his foreign minister Shimon Peres. The trio were cited for their work on the Oslo accords which created "opportunities for a new development toward fraternity in the Middle East". Supporters compared Arafat to Nelson Mandela, says Time. Opponents called him an "unrepentant terrorist with a long legacy of promoting violence".

Wangari Maathai, 2004: The first African woman to win a Nobel Peace prize died in 2011 at the age of 71. The New York Times describes her as an "environmentalist, feminist, politician, professor, rabble-rouser and human rights advocate" who created jobs for women and an organisation that planted trees across Kenya in a bid to fight erosion. The day before she was due to collect the peace prize in Stockholm, a story appeared in an African newspaper that claimed she had likened Aids to a "biological weapon" and told participants in an Aids workshop that the disease was "a tool" to control Africans "designed by some evil-minded scientists." Maathai confronted the storm of controversy by insisting her comments had been taken out of context. "I neither say nor believe that the virus was developed by white people or white powers in order to destroy the African people," she said in a statement released by the Nobel committee. "Such views are wicked and destructive."

Barack Obama, 2009: Riding high on the goodwill sparked by his election victory the previous year, Obama was a popular winner. At the time, America's first black president said he didn't deserve the award. Four years down the track, plenty of people seem to agree with him. In an article published by the Daily Beast last month, Kirsten Powers says it's time for Obama to give his Nobel Peace prize back. She cites his determination to attack Syria, with or without a UN Security Council resolution, as one reason; the escalation of a "pointless and failing" war in Afghanistan is another. But the main reason Obama should turn in his prize is his "five-year Middle East drone war" which has killed an estimated "500 to 800 innocents", writes Powers.

Figue I broaden the topic a bit on "questionable" awardee's

**Relapse**

What if we found out the committee was just in reality an epic group of trolls?

**sebster**

Jihadin wrote:
Figue I broaden the topic a bit on "questionable" awardee's

Once again, the Peace Prize is awarded not just to give a congratulations to people who've already achieved everything they needed to achieve. That would make it a pointless bit of feel good nonsense. The award is given to people in the midst of peace efforts, as an effort to promote those causes and make their outcomes more likely. This entails considerably more risk on the part of the committee, as it is possible that an award might be given to peace efforts that might fail, only for the recipients to return to violent means.

And yes, it often involves given awards to people who've done terrible things in the past. But that's the reality of world affairs. The people who rise to control of armed groups generally did a lot of violent stuff in rising to the top of those organisations, for fairly obvious reasons. What matters is what they are doing now for peace. And what is useful is to recognise the efforts they are making for peace right now.

Your list, for instance, leave out Nelson Mandela, who spent his youth as a marxist terrorist, and was given his award in the midst of negotiations, when it was possible the whole process might have collapsed.

So we can think about these things and understand why the job of the committee is extremely complex and prone to judgements that might go wrong. Or we can just write up lists of awards where the committee got it wrong, because being smug is easier and more fun.

**whembly**

Kilkrazy wrote:
To be fair it is only the whackiest right wingers who are "birthers", you cannot tar everyone conservative with that brush.

To be fair, fair... it was the Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign that started the whole birther movement.

**dogma**

whembly wrote:

To be fair, fair... it was the Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign that started the whole birther movement.

There is no evidence of that.

**whembly**

dogma wrote:
whembly wrote:

To be fair, fair... it was the Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign that started the whole birther movement.

There is no evidence of that.

Other publications counters that..
http://www.politico.com/story/2011/04/birtherism-where-it-all-began-053563
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/02/08/the-secret-history-of-the-birthers.html

So... keep spinning that brah.

Did you forget how downright ugly it got in the 2008 primary?

**dogma**

whembly wrote:

So... keep spinning that brah.

It isn't spin. The article I posted specifically differentiates between the Clinton campaign, and Clinton supporters; as did both of yours. Clinton had control over campaign, as all candidates do. The same cannot be said regarding her supporters, again something is true of all candidates. As such to state that the 2008 Clinton campaign started the birther thing is without basis.

**whembly**

dogma wrote:
whembly wrote:

So... keep spinning that brah.

It isn't spin. The article I posted specifically differentiates between the Clinton campaign, and Clinton supporters; as did both of yours. Clinton had control over campaign, as all candidates do. The same cannot be said regarding her supporters, again something is true of all candidates. As such to state that the 2008 Clinton campaign started the birther thing is without basis.

Okay... I'll give you that and I think I got another event mixed up with this one...

The one I was thinking were the claims that Obama was a Muslim came out of her 2008 campaign.

**SlaveToDorkness**

Regardless of if it were her camp or supporters (what is the meaning of "is"?!) it sure wasn't those whacky right-wingers.

**Peter Wiggin**

Of course Obama didn't earn the peace prize. Did anyone actually think he had done so?

At any rate, it always makes my heart hurt to see the meaning of an award cheapened by political application.

Psienesis wrote:
Latinos are "white", though there are definitely aspects of American society who wish they weren't. They're of European descent (Spain, primarily) following interbreeding with (and later extermination of) the native populations of the New World, especially in the Caribbean and Central/South America.

"Interbreeding"
"Extermination"

Careful. Your "decolonize" style politics are showing.

**Ouze**

SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Regardless of if it were her camp or supporters (what is the meaning of "is"?!) it sure wasn't those whacky right-wingers.

No, I think think that's pretty clear. They may have carried the ball 95 yards, but it was definitely brought onto the field by some degree of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

**sebster**

whembly wrote:
The one I was thinking were the claims that Obama was a Muslim came out of her 2008 campaign.

No, the claims that Obama was a Muslim were around since 2004, after he shot to national attention at the DNC rally. It was a pretty steady subject among the far right noise machine.

One Clinton staffer forwarded an email that was a Muslim, and Clinton fired that person as soon as she found out. Trying to put it on Clinton is just wrong.

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SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Regardless of if it were her camp or supporters (what is the meaning of "is"?!) it sure wasn't those whacky right-wingers.

Only if we think that the first person to mention something is the only person we can blame for everything that came afterwards. It'd be like blaming Gavrilo Princip for the whole of WWI, just for killing Franz Ferdinand.

I do quite like watching the right now trying to walk away from all the mud they threw at Obama.

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Peter Wiggin wrote:
At any rate, it always makes my heart hurt to see the meaning of an award cheapened by political application.

It is a political prize with a clear political intent.