Obama Haters Still Hate Obama

The AP has the headline: From right and left, questions about peace prize.  And once again, we get this false dynamic, in which it's imagined that there's lots of valid criticism of an event involving Obama simply because they can find people who diss him. 

And the writer even ponders why it would be that even liberals would criticize Obama's prize, as if no one had ever noticed that the far left never liked Obama.  The leftier people supported Hillary and accused Obama of being a centrist (despite Hillary's strong centrist connections) and the leftiest people supported Nader or some other impossible presidential hopeful.  And even the leftier types who supported Obama were reluctant to do so and always added caveats that they knew he'd betray them.

But one quick tweak to the general idea of this article and we get this: People who criticize everything Obama does continue to criticize him.  And that's it.  That's all we're seeing here and the story has all the quality of Dog Sniffs Dog.  Normal people can disagree with Obama, but only a freak is going to criticize this event.  And if anything, this sort of thing should be used as a litmus test of one's rationality.  If you can't even be happy for Obama receiving this award, but instead have to use it as an opportunity to bash the guy, you have no credibility and need to leave quietly.

But rather than realizing their insanity, these people are given yet another platform from which to bash Obama, just as they did when he tried to get us the Olympics.  Somehow, they fail to see that by constantly haranguing Obama for even positive events, they're completely delegitimizing everything they do, so that even their valid attacks will be ignored.

Bombs for Peace

Oh, and speaking of clueless, here was my favorite conservative comment, from Marcus Traianus:

Suure. Bush Freed the people of Iraq and Afghanistan from tyranny…and Obama gets the NPP?

Yes, because war is peace in the minds of conservatives.  And once we're done bombing the world into submission, we'll finally have peace .  And that's the thing, I really do think that Obama partially earned this because the Bushies had set the bar so low that merely returning to pre-neo-con standards of diplomacy is enough.  (And that includes much of the Clinton-era saber rattling). 

It's easy to get credit for aiding world peace when you're given control of a country that was responsible for a large part of the fighting.  Hell, just the knowledge that we're no longer trying to start a war with Iran should be enough to have won him the prize.