Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Everyone is talking about it. They want to know what they put in the water in Stockholm. Why would the Nobel committee give the prize to someone who hadn't really done much for world peace? Of course, the committee spokesmen had their lame answers. Now, they're just hoping Obama doesn't make fools of them.
It is as if the Pulitzer committee had given the prize to someone whose book had just one chapter; "We hope this will encourage him to finish it well," says the committee.
But the Nobel committee might have done worse. Barack Obama is not the first American president to win the award. Woodrow Wilson got it before him. Obama seems ready to continue unnecessary wars. But at least he didn't start them. Wilson sent American troops into the Europea in 1917. He transformed the European war into a World War and drew it out for another 2 years...at a cost of millions of lives, not to mention trillions in expenses.
Wilson was a fool and a humbug, no more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Kaiser Wilhelm. As for Obama, we haven't quite gotten his measure yet. Fool? Fraud? It's still too early to say.
But if he had been smart, he would have followed the example of another US president - Millard Fillmore. Go to Washington. You will find no monuments to Fillmore. 'Tis a pity. Fillmore actually kept the peace. Not only that, he made improvements; he installed running water in the White House. Then, when Oxford University offered him an honorary degree, he turned it down. The degree was written in Latin. Fillmore said he didn't want a degree he couldn't understand.
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia
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About the Author
Best-selling investment author Bill Bonner is the founder and president of Agora Publishing, one of the world's most successful consumer newsletter companies. Owner of both Fleet Street Publications and MoneyWeek magazine in the UK, he is also author of the free daily e-mail The Daily Reckoning.
