No joke. President Obama, who has essentially accomplished nothing, has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. This isn’t all that surprising when you stop to think about what the Nobel Prize Committee is all about, which is basically a far left ideologue prize committee.

If you make grandiose speeches about ’saving’ the planet, nuclear arms reduction, and easing tensions with the Muslim world, then you are worthy of an award. Even if your actions ultimately ruin an economy for fraudulent environmental reasons, reduce the nuclear arms of Western democracies while doing nothing meaningful to stop terrorist-sponsoring rogue nations from acquiring them, and embolden Islamic terrorists around the world, then European liberals give you a prize. After all, this is the same group that gave a so-called Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, the godfather of modern terrorism, and thus the Nobel Committee had lost all credibility (assuming it had any to begin with).

Some are suggesting this premature award is simply a slap at Bush for his ‘unilateral’ war in Iraq (unilateral if you ignore all the other nations involved). The world didn’t seem to mind Bill Clinton unilaterally bombing Serbia. Multilateralism or unilateralism by themselves means very little without any context, because whether or not a nation’s actions are legitimate is not dependent on the number of other nations participating. Victor Hanson nicely explains some multilateral history: “In 1939 a “multilateral” world - Germany, Italy, Russia, along with support from Spain, Japan, and many Eastern Europe states, and the indifference of the United States and most of the Americas - decided to carve up Poland; a “unilateral” Britain choose to become bothersome and thus resisted.” As much as the simplistic multilateral diplomacy of Obama and the left may get you a prize, a cookie-cutter approach to foreign policy isn’t always right. But whatever the reasons for Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, it is nothing to be proud of.