Echoes in Eternity

In case you've had your head in the sand recently, our venerable Commander in Chief Barry Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last Monday. The timing of the announcement came about 36 hours after Saturday Night Live had eviscerated the president in its opening skit (see here for the hilarity). As if imbued with an incredible sense of comedic timing itself, CNN quickly FACT-CHECKED the SNL routine. Oh, for the days when they would just laugh along when SNL ripped Bush. Now they're stuck defending their messiah to their own liberal brethren.

Mark Steyn had this to say about this new turn of events.

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics website the other day was: “Is Obama Becoming A Joke?” With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Up next: His stunning victory in this year’s Miss World contest. December 12th, Johannesburg. You read it here first.
...
Given the [CNN's] ever more exhaustive absence of viewers among the non-flight-delayed demographic, perhaps Wolf could make it a regular series.
...
Reflecting the new harmony of US-world relations since the administration hit the “reset” button, The Times of London declared the award “preposterous” and Svenska Freds (the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society) called it “shameful.”

There’s something almost quaintly vieux chapeau [old hat] about the Nobel decision, as if the hopeychangey bumper stickers were shipped surface mail to Oslo and only arrived last week. Everywhere else, they’re peeling off: The venerable lefties at Britain’s New Statesman currently have a cover story on “Barack W Bush”.
...
In a recent speech to the Manhattan Institute, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that, in diminishing American power abroad to advance statism at home, Obama and the American people will be choosing decline.

There are legitimate questions about our war aims in Afghanistan, and about the strategy necessary to achieve them. But eight years after being toppled, the Taliban will see their return to power as a great victory over the Great Satan, and so will the angry young men from Toronto to Yorkshire to Chechnya to Indonesia who graduated from Afghanistan’s Camp Jihad during the 1990s.

And so will the rest of the world: They will understand that the modern era’s ordnungsmacht (the “order maker”) has chosen decline.

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy — for America and the world.