Affirmative Action Nobel
All my life, said Voltaire, I have had but one prayer: “O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous. And God granted it.”
In awarding the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama, the Nobel committee has just made itself look ridiculous.
Consider. Though they had lead roles in ending a Cold War lasting half a century, between a nuclear-armed Soviet Empire and the West, neither Ronald Reagan nor John Paul II ever got a Nobel Prize.
In 1987, Reagan negotiated the greatest arms reduction treaty in modern time, the INF agreement removing all Soviet SS-20s and all U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles from Europe.
Other than hosting the “Beer Summit” between Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, what has Obama done to compare with what these statesmen did to make ours a more peaceful and better world?
What has Obama accomplished to compare with what the other sitting presidents to receive the Nobel Prize accomplished?
Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for the Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War. Woodrow Wilson won the 1919 Nobel Prize for getting Germany to accept his 14 Points as the basis for an armistice that ended the bloodiest war in all of European history.
And what about Richard Nixon?
In 1972, he made his historic trip to China, ending a quarter century of hostility, negotiated SALT I with Leonid Brezhnev, limiting ICBMs, and ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam. True, Nixon persuaded Hanoi to sign the Paris Peace Accords only after 13 days of “Christmas bombing.”
Yet that did not deter the Nobel committee from giving the 1973 prize to Henry Kissinger and Hanoi ‘s Le Duc Tho.
Early in the week his award was announced, Obama snubbed the Dalai Lama, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who has spent 50 years as a courageous voice for the rights of his Tibetan people, who have endured half a century of Chinese communist repression and cultural genocide. Which of these — the Dalai Lama or Barack Obama — seems more deserving of a Nobel Prize for Peace?
Since the news broke, the president has been a national object of mockery and mirth. In fairness, this is not his fault. There is no evidence he lobbied for the prize; no evidence he knew it was coming.
“Is this April Fools’ Day?” said one startled aide.
In accepting, Barack was properly humble, saying that he did not belong in the company of previous recipients, that he would try to live up to the expectations his Nobel had created.
It is the members of the Nobel committee who have made fools of themselves and further devalued their prize, if that is still possible.
For how many Americans could, without Google, identify Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Muhammad Yunus, and Martti Ahtisaari? Who are they? The 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2008 winners of the Nobel Prize for Peace. In that company at least, Barack, for his willingness to talk to America’s adversaries and enemies, is not outshone.
Indeed, looking down the list of other recipients in this decade — Jimmy Carter in 2002, Muhammad ElBaradei in 2005, Al Gore in 2007 and Obama — the committee should probably rename it the Nobel Prize for Peace … and Stick-It-to-George Bush Trophy.
By 2002, Carter, who should have been included in the 1978 Nobel that went to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat for the Israeli-Egyptian peace he brokered at Camp David, had become a global pest, bedeviling Bush, as he did Bill Clinton, in violation of the tradition of ex-presidents, all the while accomplishing nothing.
While the International Atomic Energy Agency was right about no atomic weapons or programs in Iraq, ElBaradai himself regretted not having been more courageous in opposing the war. As for Gore, his prize was the committee’s way of providing publicity for a campaign against global warming that is a front for the latest scheme to advance world government.
As for Obama, he got the award because he is the quintessential anti-Bush. Yet, the Nobel committee did him no service.
They have brazenly meddled in the internal affairs of the United States. They have reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes — Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions — he did not earn. They have put him under moral pressure to mollify a pacifist left. They have brought him to the point, dangerous in politics, where a man becomes the butt of reflexive jokes, as did Bill Clinton in the Monica affair.
These Norwegian groupies, acting out of “adolescent adulation,” writes the Financial Times, have exposed themselves as “an annex to the left wing of the U.S. Democratic Party” with a “deeply misguided act” that will “embarrass (Obama’s) allies and egg on his detractors.”
The committee did something else. They ensured that their Nobel Peace Prize will never be taken as seriously again as once it was.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
“They have brazenly meddled in the internal affairs of the United States. They have reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes — Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions — he did not earn. They have put him under moral pressure to mollify a pacifist left. They have brought him to the point, dangerous in politics, where a man becomes the butt of reflexive jokes, as did Bill Clinton in the Monica affair.”
Really, the whole article is dreck, but this part takes the cake. Casually racist drivel wrapped up in a big bow of wishful thinking. Standard fare for the modern conservative movement, but electorally toxic outside of its shrinking base.
Standard fair from the modern Left: anytime a writer points out the Left’s racial motivations and/or hypocrisies, the writer is a racist.
Did Mr. Buchanan just point out that Obama did not deserve the Peace Prize as opposed to….Woodrow Wilson? If memory serves, Mr. Buchanan placed a lot of blame on Wilson for the many disasters of the 20th century in his book on Churchill and Hitler (rightly so in my opinion). While I generally like and admire Mr. Buchanan, every now and then the Beltway creature in him takes over from the populist and he acts as Grand Old Partisan (his pathetic endorsement of George W. Bush in 2004 comes to mind).
“Other than hosting the “Beer Summit” between Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, what has Obama done to compare with what these statesmen did to make ours a more peaceful and better world?”
To be fair: how many other Nobel Laureates could do as much to bring Harvard and working-class, regular guy Cambridge together?
Affirmative Action is a solution to the growing disparity of economic inequality between blacks and whites. Simply put, it is essentially a lawsuit, atonement of the transgressions of white slave owners, which have greatly contributed to this economic disparity. I have never benefited from affirmative action myself nor do, I know of anyone who has as well. However, I am aware that white women have benefited the most from this federal program. Nevertheless, I do not think affirmative action is sufficient in terms of retribution, but it is essential and it is a start.
Civil rights programs, during the reconstruction era, helped African Americans become full citizens of the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery. Emancipated slaves searched for families and jobs, most former slaves, without land or resources, became laborers.
Freed slaves were making progress-building schools, teachers’ trained and black politicians elected to office. However, these gains vanquished after southern whites took back political power. The Black Codes of 1865 was a unique attempt for white southerners to maintain the way of life prior to the civil war. Meaning that while slaves were free, they were restricted and opportunities limited.
The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law, which also meant to protect the rights of newly freed slaves in the South, limit the participation of ex-Confederate leaders in government, and guarantee the payment of debt. President Abraham Lincoln promised the freed slaves 40 acres and a mule. Nevertheless, President Andrew Johnson revoked that promise.
The Fifteenth Amendment forbids racial discrimination in access to voting. The 1866 Civil Rights Act guarantees every citizen “the same right to make and enforce contracts…as is enjoyed by white citizens…” The Ku Klux Klan was a white underground terrorist group, which created a wave of terror. Threaten violence, bullying, lynching, setting fire to buildings and murdering blacks. The KKK would not accept black people as equals. Their beliefs were that whites were superior to blacks and as a result, many blacks did not register to vote and kept away from white areas.
Blacks were entitled to receive the same public services as mandated by the “separate but equal” doctrine. In June of 1892, blacks were required to sit in a black-only railroad car. Homer Plessy arrested and thrown in a New Orleans jail, a black man, for sitting in a whites-only car. In one of the most shameful decisions ever issued by the United States Supreme Court, PLESSY V. FERGUSON. Segregation was insult enough, but the suggestion that such an oppressive policy was, in part, meant for an oppressed race benefit was galling in its dishonesty. Therefore, Homer Plessy lost his petition in the courts; Plessy would not receive equal treatment with whites in America.
President John Kennedy first used the term, “affirmative action”, in 1961. He required that all federal contractors “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed… without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” President Lyndon Johnson reinforced this obligation by Executive Order in 1965 by requiring “goals and timetables.” However, political pressure forced Johnson to retract this demand. Nevertheless, in 1969, President Richard Nixon revived the idea in the “Philadelphia Order” aimed at increasing minority membership in the city’s construction trades, and in 1970, he extended the requirement to all private companies with a federal government contract.
Meanwhile, the courts were turning to the use of quotas in order to break racial barriers when other methods proved ineffective. For example, in 1970 Alabama State Troopers did not employ a single black trooper. A federal court ordered the state agency to develop a plan for the recruitment and hiring of African Americans. After Eighteen-months (18), still there were no black troopers. Therefore, the court ordered the hiring of one African American for every white trooper hired until blacks constituted 25% of the force.
Families pass their wealth down to their children. In turn, their hope is that their children will be successful and can pass wealth down to the next generation, and so on. The black unemployment rate continues to hover at twice that among whites, being the first to rise at the start of recessions. Some white people understand the complexities of black people struggles in that racism manifests itself on many levels. Black people know that the system is compromising them in ways that they could never imagine. In an effort to right a wrong of the past treatment of blacks, various policies were enacted or created. The thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth amendments and other civil rights policies were to make blacks “whole” again.
Conservatives voice opposition to civil rights legislation to avoid costly litigation associated with Affirmative Action, employers will inevitably resort to a hiring quota for women and minorities. Affirmative action is a test of character. Minority preference is the meagerness recompense for centuries of unrelieved oppression. In America, many marginally competent or flatly incompetent whites gain employment every day, some because their white skin suits the conscious or unconscious racial preference of their employers. Worse, white incompetence is always an individual matter, but for blacks it is often confirmation of ugly stereotypes. Given that unfairness cuts both ways, does it not only balance the scales of history, does this repay, in a small way, the systematic denial under which African-American ancestors lived out their days?
In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentant and redemptive.
The idea that affirmative action violates the rights of white citizens confuses a right with an expectation. We all have a right to be “seriously and fairly considered” for a job or a position. In the past, blacks were not even considered for a job had their rights violated; in the present, whites are seriously and fairly considered, yet still not selected. However, their rights are not violated, but rather had their expectations frustrated. If affirmative action disappears from the American scene, many blacks will continue to excel and succeed. However, that will be “the signal” that would prove to be lethal for our country. That is, white supremacy now has one less constraint and black people have one more reason to lose trust in the promise of American democracy.
Advocates of affirmative action say that the playing field is “not yet leveled” and that granting modest advantages to minorities and women is more than fair, given hundreds of years of discrimination that benefited whites and men. My own view is that the case against affirmative action is weak, resting, as it does so heavily, on myth and misunderstanding. The arguments favoring affirmative action and the arguments opposing it have considerable appeal, with the ultimate persuasiveness of those arguments being a function of the analytical perspective that one adopt when evaluating them. Each set of arguments “can be framed” in a manner that makes it seem consistent with general principles of equality and race neutrality. If one views equality as a concept that is to “be measured” against an ideal or aspiration baseline, race-conscious affirmative action seems necessary to equalize imbalances caused by slavery and segregation.
The myth, that affirmative action undermines standards and that it is unfair to white males. Affirmative action’s legitimacy reveal both distorted notions of how affirmative action works and an insidious values hierarchy that puts expectations of white males over the rights and expectations of members of other groups. Affirmative action’s viability for the future may depend upon a proponents’ strategy that responds vigorously to these criticisms. Affirmative action does not undermine merit selection and the use of qualification criteria is perhaps the most repeated, and least substantiated, criticism. One way to examine this assertion is to evaluate what has happened at the nation’s most competitive colleges and universities. If affirmative action in fact lowers standards, then increased numbers of minorities and white women at highly competitive schools should coincide with demonstrable declines in academic excellence among those student populations. Yet no one, not even affirmative action’s harshest critics has suggested that the nation’s most academically competitive colleges and universities have increased the diversity of their student bodies at the expense of their overall excellence.
Affirmative action’s critics focus instead on evidence that blacks and Latinos have, at some schools, lower average GPAs and standardized test scores. They also point to lower graduation rates among those groups as evidence of academic inadequacy. While such data may justify attention to the particular educational and social needs of minority students, there are at least two reasons why they are a poor basis on which to judge affirmative action. First, since blacks and Latino students are more likely than whites to come from weaker academic backgrounds, their relative under-performance is not surprising. Second, minority group status brings special challenges to the college experience, even at the most welcoming institutions. Therefore, the performance and graduation rate data may reveal as much about these challenges as they do about academics.
Affirmative action underwent a remarkable escalation of its mission from simple anti-discrimination enforcement to social engineering by means of quotas, goals, time-tables, set-asides and other forms of preferential treatment. When affirmative action grew into social engineering, diversity became a golden word. Diversity is a term that applies democratic principles to races and cultures rather than to citizens, despite the fact that there is nothing to indicate that real diversity is the same thing as proportionate representation. Democracy demands obligation of its citizens, however democracy has to be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.
Jack Tracey,
Sorry, chum, not in the market for a strawman right now, but thanks so much for the offer.
Try another fallacy, chum. This one doesn’t apply.
Sorry, Jack, but if it looks like a strawman, sounds like a strawman, and does the job of a strawman, it’s a strawman.
Or in other words, when a sad old coot with a long history of race-based bigotry and a soft-spot for Hitler writes that the first black president can’t – possibly – have earned all the awards he’s recieved in the past, and then titles his drivel “The Affirmative Action Nobel”, it’s pretty where he’s coming from, and it’s not a good place, or a defensible one.
And throwing out the oh-so predictable “You people are always playing the race-card, you’re the racists!” line doesn’t change that, no matter how often you repeat it.
Sorry, Tony, but my comment was not an example of the “straw man” fallacy, because I didn’t misrepresent your position, namely that Buchanan is a racist. (You just confirmed that you think he is a Hitler-loving bigot.)
His column here is pointing out that the Left makes decisions, whether symbolic or truly consequential, based on racial considerations. That’s the very nature of affirmative action: institutional preferences that favor non-whites. Honesty about this practice– or worse yet, objecting to it– leads people on the Left to dismiss any white writer’s perspective as racist, and therefore worthless.
So tell me truly, just how often does the Left judge a man by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character (or column)?
I disagree with Mr. PJB’s assessment of Carter. Carter, well into his ’80s, could be pounding salt while puffing on ceegars on a peanut plantation in Georgia, or whatever his heart desires. Instead, he’s dedicated his life to ensuring that our ideals, our real democratic ideals (which are not brought about by the barrel of our guns, or our Congressmen who, at the direction of another nation, refuse to recognize elected governments), are put forth and carried on by other nations in the form of free and fair elections, and real liberty and justice for all.
Carter has also brazenly flipped the bird to the Israeli lobby on every American medium – mainstream and otherwise – that would let him speak on the matter of Palestine, an act that has garnered him all of the respect in the world from this (Republican) forum poster.
It takes a lot of cojones to do that, something which Mr. PJB and others at this mag know all too well. You all get dragged through the mud, to say the least, when you do something like that.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of this article, well said.
Jack Tracey,
Put those goalposts back where you found them, they’re there for a reason.
My position was that the part of Buchanan’s screed I highlighted was casually racist and a sad example of wishful thinking. I could do that with pretty much total confidence because both charges are self-evidently true.
You misrepresented my position by ignoring the reason I called Buchanan out for racism and instead inserted your own right-wing strawman theory, namely that ‘The Left’ – always – smears people as racist to hide their own racism, so Buchanan obviously can’t be racist, because someone from ‘The Left’ claimed he was.
Silly circular logic that only makes sense if you already buy into a whole raft of right-wing themes that have no foundation in reality.
Oh, and BTW, it’s the fact that Buchanan was here only a few days ago arguing that poor old Adolf was forced into WWII by insidious outside pressure and would – never – have invaded the rest of Europe if he’d just been left alone that makes him, in your words, a “Hitler-loving bigot”. When the jackboot fits, etc, etc.
And as for this:
“So tell me truly, just how often does the Left judge a man by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character (or column)?”
Let me put it this way. Barack Obama is – not – where he is today because he’s been the undeserving recipient of outrageously unfair preferential treatment. But far too many on the Right of American politics refuse to acknowledge that he won the White House fair and square because they can’t get past the colour of his skin.
There’s a word for that kind of thinking.
Thank you for proving my point, Mr J. I assume that since you use words like “chum” that you live on the other side of the pond. Maybe we can meet for a pint next time I’m over there.