Was there even a note of ever-so-slight self-consciousness in President Obama’s reference, during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, to his observation that the award may have been for aspirations rather than real achievements?

Surely this has to be a first in the weird and wonderful decisions by the liberal socialists that come to their odd conclusion each year on who should receive what was once, in a saner age, an award given to real achievers of matters of substantive worth.

Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite, progenitor of a whole range of other explosives that became adapted from peacetime use to usage in warfare.

Nobel signed his last will and testament, Nov. 27, 1895, making a bequest of the largest share of his fortune to a series of prizes which became known, in his honor, as the Nobel Prizes. One such prize was the Peace Prize, dedicated to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Thus this particular prize was to be awarded to recipients who demonstrated actual tangible achievements contributing to peace among the nations.

That this was Nobel’s stated intention is clearly understood by his declaration that it should be awarded to those who have contributed the greatest benefit to mankind. So, in the mind of the benefactor, Nobel, the award was for actual achievement, not mere sophistry, or the aspiration of “good” intentions, but the actual attaining of those benefits by mankind!

But, in the instance of President Obama, the award appears to have been granted on the basis of his verbiage, mere sophistry, rather than tangible achievements. For, after eight months in office, we still await any real, demonstrably measurable “benefits to mankind” from this current American administration. So far all we have is talk. And there has certainly been plenty of that!

There is a strong feeling in some circles that this award is meant to be a significant slap in the face for President George W. Bush, by way of an endorsement of the Obama administration’s aggressive stance in opposition to his predecessor’s foreign policy.

The very fact that Russia’s President Medvedev and Cuba’s Fidel Castro lauded the awarding of this much-sullied prize to the American president does little to install confidence in those (such as Poland and the world’s whipping boy, the tiny nation of Israel) who once looked upon America as their protector and the defender of peace in an increasingly shaky, disorderly world.

But it’s the company that President Obama joins that really reveals the manner in which he is looked upon by the liberal-socialist radical push in global society.

By accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (which he was, of course, free to refuse), the president broadcasts to the world that he is quite content to be lumped in with fellow recipients of the award of the likes of the cowardly terrorist Yasser Arafat, prime promoter of the global warmist nut factor, Al Gore, and the most extreme of appeasing postwar presidents (at least up to the most recent U.S. election), Jimmy Carter.

That’s a motley bunch of anti-American-traditional-values non-achievers as ever there was!

The Nobel Committee announced on Friday that Obama had won the peace prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

By that we can conclude it endorses the president’s anti-Israel foreign policy, the capitulation to Russian demands by not proceeding to install an antiballistic missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, the decision to send a shipful of band-aids to Georgia in the wake of Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia, the appeasing outreach to Islamic terrorist enterprises, the indication of imminent withdrawal of usaf forces from Japan, the plan to reduce America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons in the face of the escalation of their development and deployment by rogue nations, and the prospect of drawing down U.S. troop commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the recommendation for the award of this prize emanating as it did from the European nation of Norway, we also assume that it is a smiling endorsement of President Obama’s claim in his memoirs that he has no personal, emotional connection to Europe.

But, to revert to our earlier argument, the Nobel Peace Prize was instituted to recognize real achievers in efforts to promote lasting world peace. We look, in vain, for even a beginning score, even if only a few runs on the board, from the Obama administration’s efforts in the sphere of achieving world peace and we strike a void.

Not yet having achieved even a full year in office, we see an administration high on idiot-board-driven sophistry that has yet to strike one home run in favor of a foreign policy in the direct national interests of the United States.

If ever there was an award for non-achievement, this latest Nobel Peace Prize has to be it!

Yet, should we expect any more than this?

For full well the Eternal Creator of mankind prophesied of the times in which we live: “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths” (Isaiah 3:12).