Reality outstupids parody once again

I was up very late last night, as is my habit (one of the nice things about a job done mostly from home is that if I want to sit at my computer playing Victoria: Revolutions at 3:30 AM, that's my prerogative), and I saw the news that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize minutes after it started hitting news sites. I honestly thought it was some sort of joke until I punched "Barack Obama Nobel" into Google and got some confirmations.

I suppose I shouldn't get my dander up about the sanctity of an award that has been given to Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger (though at least both of them received their award for significant involvement in actual peace-ish activities), but this is absurd. It's as if an article from The Onion ridiculing the Obama cult of personality somehow rose from the page and took over the real world.

There was a widespread perception that Paul Krugman's Economics Prize was politically motivated as an anti-Bush gesture, but there was a time- before he became the Platonic Form of the Partisan Hack walking the earth in human guise- when Krugman actually was a contributor to the science. Obama's award has been justfied on the grounds of his alleged intentions: he thinks it would be sort of nice if there were no nuclear weapons and people in the Middle East didn't murder each other so much. (It should also be noted that some of Obama's anti-nuclear statement were in the context of trying to intimidate North Korea and Iran, the latter of which he has openly threatened with military force for failing to comply with inspections.)

Meanwhile, he continues to wage Bush's war in Iraq and intends to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He has escalated the bombing of targets in Pakistan, killing hundreds of noncombatants, and has threatened preemptive attacks on Iran. These are the actions of a man awarded the world's most prestigious award for makers of peace. Given that we now have such thorough confirmation that The One is indeed an infallible, transcendent being, could we just stop beating around the bush, have the Senate declare Obama a god, and be done with it? We could throw in the Hugo for Best Fanzine, the Stanley Cup, and the Outstanding Asian-Americans in Business Award while we're at it; his qualifications for those are at least as strong.