

[media id=10311] Everyone (except Shep Smith) at Fox News, including various reporters, spent the day yesterday whining about how mean the White Hous

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Everyone (except Shep Smith) at Fox News, including various reporters, spent the day yesterday whining about how mean the White House was being to them, telling everyone that they're a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Guess the truth hurts. (More on that in a bit.)

It's funny they should say that. Because that same day, every single one of Fox's prime-time "opinion show" anchors devoted time and energy to running down President Obama -- and the Nobel committee -- for his just-announced Peace Prize.

Sean Hannity was so worked up, he devoted two whole segments to the subject, featuring the gnome who lives under the bridge Dick Morris and Mark Steyn. (You'll love Hannity's definition of "peace.") Bernie Goldberg ran through their comparable records of non-accomplishment and announced that he would win the prize next year. But the real corker, of course, came from Glenn Beck, who was able to figure out just what Obama's Nobel Peace Prize really meant:

It may be more revealing on how Europe and the rest of the world views Obama. He [Obama] is dismantling the United States one piece at a time.

And doing so, evidently, at the behest of his European masters. (But wait! I thought he was born in Kenya!)

This really is getting unseemly. A little carping could be expected, but for God's sake, can't any of these people get some perspective? The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the world's great honors, and it's an honor for it to go to an American.

Hannity, for instance, harps on the fact that Obama's nomination came only 12 days after he was inaugurated. But the committee keeps reviewing nominees -- including their current activities -- up until the final vote, which took place not long ago. So Hannity's point is a nonsequitur.

What never seems to occur to any of them is the obvious, simple and clear reason that Obama won the Nobel: He won the Presidency of the United States -- and in so doing, ended conservative-movement rule in America.

The entire world could see that the Bush administration, enabled by a Republican Congress, and fueled by an increasingly bellicose and irrational talk-show was the greatest threat to global peace since the fall of the Berlin Wall -- outpacing even the terrorist disturbances of Al Qaeda, particularly in lives lost. Nor would conservatives give up their hold on power readily; defeating them was no mean feat.

Entertaining such thoughts, though, would paralyze any well-trained right-winger in a fit of cognitive dissonance, so it never comes up on places like Fox.

Michael Moore may have put it best:





It's also worth noting that the Peace Prize historically has gone to those -- like Martin Luther King -- who have produced important transformative steps in the furtherance of civil rights and the healing of the racial divide, which has produced so much misery and inflicted so much violence in America alone. Obama's election as the first African-American president represents just such a moment, and he deserves recognition for that alone as well.

The Fox folks need to get a grip. And if they wonder why the White House sees them as reflexively opposed to everything and anything Obama does, they should just play the above video as a reminder.

About David Neiwert

