For those of you who haven't heard the incredibly strange news yet, Barack Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Here's the announcement, straight from Nobel's website:

<sub>"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges." "</sub>

No...you're not reading that wrong. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize for not being a dick and having an optimistic vision for the future in which all the bad guys willingly give up their nuclear weapons. Don't forget that giving people hope part, though. He always manages to do that quite well without actually doing anything.

Notice nowhere in the article do they say he has done anything tangible to deserve the prize, no, he has just started to bring the US back to what it used to be, a nation willing to sit down and talk.

To me, that's really really sad. Incredibly sad. Anyone who talks to me once in a while thinks I don't like Obama, but anyone who knows me knows that I really don't mind him. I think he has a lot of potential, I just wish he wouldn't make so many promises that we all know he can't keep.

Apparently those who award the Nobel Peace Prize don't agree. They're willing to give this once prestigious award to the celebrity of the politics world solely because he's not a brute and because he says he wants to fix all the world's problems.

I guess good intentions do go a long way, moreso than staying in a war-torn country to personally treat 21,000 victims of sexual abuse and then setting up a hospital that in turn treats hundreds of thousands more.