Washington — If anyone has doubted the growth of
Anti-Americanism in Europe, their doubts surely were silenced when
the Nobel Prize Committee gave its “Peace Prize” to Jimmy Carter.
For over twenty years every American who loves this country and
takes pride in its achievements has avoided mentioning Jimmy as
president, perhaps as carpenter, perhaps as peanut farmer, but not
as president, and surely not as diplomat or peacemaker. Practically
every country he leaves after his peace posturing he leaves a
corrupt despotism or perhaps at best a corrupt oligarchy.
He was the worst president of the Twentieth Century. After him
members of the Harding family could again hold their heads high. He
followed President Gerald Ford in office, which should not have
been a hard act to follow. When he handed the keys of the White
House to that second-rate actor he so preposterously patronized,
our economy was so feeble and our status in the world so low that
members of the Ford family too could again hold their heads high. A
Nobel Peace Prize for Carter? How about conferring a Nobel Prize
for Literature on Ford?
Actually, considering Jimmy’s pathetic poetry with its
little-boy qualities of petulance and self-absorption, the Nobel
Committee’s next act of anti-Americanism might be to give Jimmy
their prize for literature. The Nobel Committee really does seem to
have a dispendious contempt for America. Gunnar Berge, the
insufferably smug chairman of the Nobel Committee, upon conferring
his absurd prize on Carter boasted of it as a “kick in the leg” to
the Bush Administration for its resolute approach to the butcher,
Saddam Hussein. Berge prides himself as a man of peace, though not
many genuine men of peace speak of kicking people in the leg. For
that matter not many genuine men of peace are mere poseurs.
What does Berge know about ensuring peace in the world? His
committee never conferred a peace prize on Ronald Reagan or on his
successor George Bush. Instead in 1990 the Committee raised up a
failed Communist dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev, recognizing one of
history’s great incompetents and ignoring totally America’s role in
bringing the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. Or does Berge
believe that a reelected Carter could have achieved the irenic
effect that Reagan and Bush achieved?
Those two American presidents really did bring peace to the
world. Without Ronald Reagan Berge and his countrymen would still
be living under the shadow of Soviet tyranny and the daily fear of
nuclear holocaust. Bush I stopped Saddam’s aggression, dealt
sensitively with the broken Soviet regime and the humbled Russian
government, and assured a new era of peace in the world. That he
tried Berge’s revered “moderate point of view” with the defeated
Saddam is a testimonial to how flexible Americans can be and how
futile such flexibility is in dealing with a Saddam or a
Hitler.
In the 1930s one can see Berge giving Winston Churchill a “kick
in the leg” and conferring his Peace Prize on Neville Chamberlain.
The whole history of the Nobel Peace Prize is a history of placing
appeasement on a pedestal. There have been rare exceptions, perhaps
when it gave its award to genuine men of war such as Yasser Arafat
and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho — though in their cases they are
men of surreptitious war. Both treated the Nobel Committee as an
element in world progress just like them.
But to return to Jimmy Carter — he has always been a fraud and
an opportunist. His prey has always been the liberal sap. In
running for the presidency in 1976 he gave these as his
credentials: “I am a Southerner and an American. I am a farmer, an
engineer, a father and a husband, a Christian, a politician and a
former governor, a planner, a businessman, a nuclear physicist, a
naval officer, a canoist, and among other things, a lover of Bob
Dylan’s songs and Dylan Thomas’ poetry. ” That colossal statement
of balder and dash appeared in James David Barber’s nonsensical
tome, Presidential Greatness, where Barber explained that
he expected Carter to be a great president in the rank of Franklin
Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy.
Now the Nobel Committee has reinforced Carter’s claim to
greatness, but we Americans know better. He confirms what we all
know about political prizes. They go to political charlatans.
