Obama's Peace Prize And Republican Hatred

Why the Right REALLY hates Obama's Nobel
by Paganus Sat Oct 10, 2009
The conservative media's collective unravelling at the news of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize should surprise no one at this point. They have actively hated the Peace Prize since Carter won it.
But the tone and substance of the analysis from the Right clearly reveal, once again, a more deeply seated, and somewhat disturbing, basis for their criticism. Their vision of the world at peace is essentially a Roman one: the eagle victorious atop crushed 'enemies,' a fearful prospect to allies and rivals alike. "Oderint dum metuant - let them hate so long as they fear."
Of course, the problem with this approach to peacemaking is obvious. 1) It's not really peace and 2) it fools exactly no one. The Roman Historian Tacitus, in one of his more remarkable moments of empathy, has a British chieftain say of the Romans, "Auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." - "to ravage, to kill, to steal under false pretenses they call "empire;" and when they make a desert and they call it peace."
Obama's initial rapprochement with the Muslim world, his trip to Egypt, his opening of discussions with Iran, his insistence on ending the occupation of Iraq, and his reformulating of the mission in Afghanistan have turned the basic neoconservative foreign policy formulation on its head. For that alone, for repudiating the imperial course laid by the the previous administration, he richly deserves the Nobel.
Paganus's diary
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/10/10/791845/-Why-the-Right-REALLY-hates-Obamas-Nobel