RON HART: Baracktoberfest: How to win an Obama Award

LOS ANGELES — I predicted it three columns ago, but I was still shocked when Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize only nine months into an accomplishment-free presidency. Tellingly, this is his biggest achievement so far, if you don’t count choosing a dog for his kids.

Obama plays basketball at the White House, mainly so he can say he actually passed something. This should make him the odds-on favorite this year to win the Naismith Award for the best college basketball player.  Could a Best Duet Grammy with Nancy Pelosi be far behind?

If he is not too busy escalating the war in Afghanistan and avoiding the Dalai Lama, Obama will once again fly to Europe to pick up his award. Perhaps he will actually have to meet with the Dalai Lama at the Nobel Peace Prize after-party. One more trip to Europe this month and he can officially run for president there, too — and takeover BMW.

If there is one thing those on the left do well, it is giving out awards to themselves. The celebrity award show season lasts from January until November each year, leaving them December to spend in rehab. This usually lines them up for further awards for being “courageous.”

The awards heaped on Obama by the left should come as no surprise, but we really should wonder whether his sense of reality has been skewed over the course of his life.

By his own admission, Obama was “not a good high school student.”  As we all know, those are the ones who get to attend Ivy League schools. After getting into Columbia and Harvard Law School on what I can only presume (since they will not make public his SAT or LSAT scores) was a big discount to the average score, Obama is used to being coddled by the left.

Once admitted, maudlin tales of woe, slights and “struggle,” both real and imagined, would get him a degree. It had to be tough for him when the other kids at his private prep school had better weed.

We know John McCain graduated near the bottom of his Naval Academy class and we know the SAT scores of all recent presidential candidates from Bush to Kerry to Gore. Yet Obama will not say what he made on this all-important standardized test. Just how much affirmative action did it take to create this Nobel Laureate?

And in fairness, how much did George W. Bush’s family have to do with his admission to an Ivy League school and his career?

Obama became a “community organizer” and then went into another career where you can be successful with no discernable skills: politics.

He thrived there by doing next to nothing and doing it surprisingly well.  He seldom, if ever, sponsored a bill or made any important decisions. He did, however, learn to read a teleprompter — very well.

Obama found himself passed through various institutions with kid gloves and with praise heaped upon him by a guilt-ridden, leftist academia. Over time, he really started to believe his own hype. The least accomplished U.S. senator ever to be elected president, Obama has to be saying to himself, “I cannot believe they are buying this.”

Only twelve days into his presidency, he was nominated by someone (yet to be revealed) for the Nobel Prize. Having embarrassed our country by saying we are arrogant and traveling the world to badmouth us, he is given this meaningless award.  

I would suggest calling all future transparently ill-deserved awards “Obamas. “
Many failed liberals, from Jimmy Carter to Al Gore, were given the Nobel Peace Prize. Ronald Reagan, who only ended the Cold War and brought down the Berlin Wall, did not win a Nobel Peace Prize.  

I understand that VP Joe Biden will attend the Nobel award presentation with Obama and, in a separate ceremony to be held at a luncheon later that week, Biden will win the Nobel Hair-Piece-of-Work Prize presented by David Letterman.

It was just as well that the Nobel Committee gave Obama the award. If they had given it to someone else, Kanye West planned to jump on stage at the ceremony to say that Obama deserved it instead.

Those Nobel Prize guys are nothing if not anticipatory.

Ron Hart is a Southern libertarian humor columnist. His E-mail: RevRon10@aol.com