Atlanta blogs today: Al Gore wins Nobel Peace
October 12, 2007 at 10:02 am by Andisheh Nouraee in NewsOf course, this will spur on more speculation that Gore might be talked into jumping into the 2008 presidential race. Personally, I’m just happy to see the guy finally getting the credit that he deserves on an issue that is affecting every living thing on this earth.
– Button Gwinnett at Liberal Lucidity on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize win. He’s the fourth elected president of the United States to win.
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Not sure if it makes up for being robbed of the presidency, but it must come pretty close.
– Sara at Going Through The Motions on Al Gore’s win.
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It was the night that Queer as Folk was to debut on Showtime, a winter’s day back in December of 2000. I was still a lonely boy struggling to find his way out of the closet, all while quickly approaching the final weeks of my undergraduate college experience.
– Duane Moody describes how snow, alcohol, and pay cable helped him come out of the closet.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
kudos to Gore, but the Nobel Peace Prize managed to Jump The Shark when they gave the medal to the man credited as the inventor of the suicide bomber.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Dale, I think the shark was jumped a bit earlier when they gave it to Henry Kissinger.
I’m not in the mood to Google, but I believe that the great Tom Lehrer said something like “Satire died the day they gave Kissinger a peace prize.”
October 15th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Kissinger got the Peace Prize for a cease fire in Vietnam and getting the USA out.
We can agree that was a huge move for peace, can’t we? The Nobel committee was working from that premise and the information available to them at the time. I know that declassified docs, as well as some some historical revisionism, made Kissinger even more hated by the anit-war Left, but consider the info the Nobel committee had at the time.
In addition to that, can’t an argument be made that the victorious Cold War soldiers, which Kissinger epitomized, eventually created a peace by removing the fear of the Soviet Union and the USA in a global nuclear war? Detente succeeded in improving diplomatic relations with the USSR and paving the way for Nixon’s historic work with China.
I can’t agree that Kissinger and Arafat are parallells. Kissinger was a key player in preventing a global nuclear war and helping keep in check the real Imperialists in the USSR and China. Vietnam was awful, how much worse if we hadn’t been there? Just look at Laos and Cambodia after we left.
To recap Kissinger helped end Vietnam, improved diplomatic relations with the USSR and opened the door for Nixon to initiate diplomatic relations with China. Those are peace efforts on a huge scale.
Arafat invented the suicide bomber as a targeted weapon of terror, walked away from every attempt by Clinton to negotiate peace with Israel by giving him the store and served as the role model for the Islamic terrorists active throughout the world today. He never wanted peace with Israel, only their destruction. He said so repeatedly. That is why the Nobel committee jumped the shark wih him.
October 15th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Dale: Andy said he’s not going to respond to your missive on Kissinger because he doesn’t feel like arguing with you about it. He suggested that you take up that argument with the Allende family. Besides, he has deadlines to make.
I, however, am sitting around doing nothing, so I have to answer your question:” Vietnam was awful, how much worse if we hadn’t been there?” … with another question: Are you fucking nuts? What you really are saying is that in the delusional world of American conservatism, one must maintain that the sky is polka-dotted, that apples can outrun antelopes, and that Vietnam and Cambodia were better off because we extended their civil war by a decade — and bomberd the hell out of them.
No wonder today’s “conservatives” think they’llwin debates over Iraq and children’s health insurance by claiming the war there is making us safer and that sick kids should just wait around for the free market to work its magic if they’re sick.
October 15th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Ken,
Thank you for the substantive response to my post about WHY Kissinger received the Nobel, WHY Arafat should not have and WHY that was jumping the shark. You chastise me for diverting arguments and then you drop this bag of crap? Doing nothing??? Your post makes me think you need to put the bong down for a little while.
Delaying, possibly preventing, the genocide of millions for 10 years is a good thing. Yes, fighting the Communist destabilization, terrorist attacks, assassinations and subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, our ally, was a good thing. We may have won had it not been for the Leftists back home fighting for the NVA.
Why didn’t you respond to the Khmer Rouge genocide, to which I was obviously referring. Based on the pure emotion of your response, you can’t.
A Democrat got us into the war by sending helicopters and the Green Berets. The next President, yes Dorothy another Democrat, escalated it with a fabricated incident. You have your “LBJ Lied, 57000 Died!!!” bumper sticker, right? . A very Conservative Republican ended it after Kissinger’s diplomacy worked. So which side is still delusional about Vietnam? Whose fault was bombing the shit out of Vietnam? It sure wasn’t us Delusional Evil Conservatives.
And why Kissinger should or should not have received the Nobel which was the POINT of the post! The red herring are jumping around your post like the flying fish LBJ said the sailors were shooting at in the Gulf of Tonkin.
I expect garbage like this from others.
As you did in your post, I will address your last paragraph with a question. I hope I am not offering a “red herring” or diverting the post to another argument….which is a mortal sin according to your previous criticism of me, even though you did the very same in that post. Oh well, being the boss has it’s privileges and ignoring intellectual consistency must be one of yours.
How is it that Bush can spend more (% of GOP, real dollars, total dollars, rupees or dinars, measure it any way you want) on children (healthcare, education, etc) than Clinton and still be a penny pinching asshole? You realize he vetoed the bill because most of the increase in SCHIP health care was to cover “children” up to 24 years old and from “poor” families of four making up to $ 80,000 per year. It would have displaced private insurance already in place for those “children” that is working just fine.
Bush is fine with spending more money on damned near everything, but the Democratic leadership knew he would veto a badly written bill and they knew they could demagogue the issue like you just did. You should have picked a better issue. There are quite a few that Bush has assed up, but SCHIP is not one of them.
Try pulling your head out of Pelosi’s ass long enough to get some oxygen to your brain. You need it.
October 15th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Yes, I know Nixon bombed the shit out of North Vietnam…. that helped bring them to the table. See they understood that they were actually losing the war, despite the press back here in the States. They even realized they lost Tet. Nixon understood that a carrot with no stick is useless at the bargaining table.
They won because we left due to politics. and the song remains the same….
October 16th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Oh Dale, I thought we had come so far and then you go and do this to Ken (the man you love and respect, remember?). I will only jump in to say two things:
1) I am disappointed in you for saying such mean things to Ken.
2) Ken’s post, while questioning your sanity (not the first time, and you know this), did explain why he thought Kissinger did not deserve the peace prize, namely because his policies (or influence on his administration’s policies) toward Vietnam prolonged our unnecessary involvement in someone else’s civil war and led to thousands more dead American soldiers. At least that’s what I took from it.
Calm down. When you get agitated, you start talking all douchey.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Mr T –
If that was what Ken was saying, then he is wrong. The war began sometime around 1949, with the US involvment in 1959. Kissinger (with Nixon) took a little over 3 years(Aug 1969 – Jan 26,1973) to negotiate a peace in a war that had been going for 30 years and we had been involved in heavily for 10 years.
Clearly the “conservatives” referred to did not extend the war by ten years. Rather they ended a massive Democratic ass.
Facts suck sometimes.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
that should read “Democratic ass up”