Nobel Peace Prize and why I pity Al Gore

Theresa LePore (left); Al Gore (center); Jimmy Carter (right)

Al Gore, UN Panel Share Nobel for Peace By DOUG MELLGREN and MATT MOORE October 12, 2007 Orlando Sentinel

OSLO, Norway - Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s climate change panel won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for spreading awareness of man-made climate change and laying the foundations for counteracting it. ...which expanded the Norwegian committee's interpretation of peacemaking and disarmament efforts that have traditionally been the award's foundations.

This has to be the most pitiful turn of events in Al Gore's history, being tagged with a Nobel Peace Prize. His previous claim to ill fame was the singlehanded demolition of the ordinary rules of courtesy nationwide when, with completely graceless lust for power, he took back his concession of the 2000 election to his opponent, pushing Theresa LePore into the global spotlight, underlining the ineptitude of Florida Democrat political action, and giving permission for Gore partisans everywhere to refuse their rabies shots and launch a global thermonuclear vendetta that destroys anything and builds nothing except bank accounts of political thug squads. One big notch in Al Gore's gunstock.

The reporters report that this event has "expanded the Norwegian committee's interpretation of peacemaking." That is their euphemism for "What the heck?"

Now former VP Gore joins the company of Jimmy Carter, recipient of a Nobel Prize for breaking the protocol of smiling and hushing up when tempted to criticize successor presidents publicly, something he did not have the gumption to do until 2001 or so. I voted twice for Jimmy Carter, never once for Ronald Reagan, but a few years ago I became embarrassed by Carter when his mouth lost its governing sense of ordinary courtesy.

People remember Carter for the Iran hostage debacle, and they forget the peace treaty he negotiated between Israel and Egypt, a peace treaty that still stands. But he did not receive anything for that - he was off the Nobel radar until he began trolling for the prize, trashing his successor, after Al Gore implicitly gave him permission to do so.

It used to be that there was some nobility in the Nobel Peace Prize: Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. This last prize, to the two fighters who became peacemakers in Egypt and Israel, the two men who made me read the Bible for the first time, that year the prize did not also go to Jimmy Carter. Too bad: that would have been fitting and right. Now, the peace prize is nearly 100% joke.

That being the case, I have to feel pity for Al Gore who doubtless will now go around bragging about his shiny peace prize. Unfortunately, that is like bragging that you own a Mustang. 40 years ago, it would have meant something. In 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize; good decision. In 1965, the Shelby Mustang came out: good car. In 2007, forget about it!

But the true mockery of the peace prize, which causes me to pity every other recipient, even Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, is that it once went to Yasser Arafat, a terrorist until the day he died. My dad the ACLU attorney taught me about Yasser Arafat, simply by his outrage that such a criminal would go to the U.N. and brandish a pistol. I remember him pointing out the photo in the evening paper to me. [Yasser Arafat carrying pistol in holster at UN in 1974; Kurt Waldheim upper left.]

Apparently, the Nobel committee cannot even blush. Jeremiah the prophet warned Israel as we should take warning today:

For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they shall fall among them that fall...