Welcome to the new world order where isolationism is as fusty a notion as fairness and balance. Actions on the local level reverberate so globally that even the pissy little nyah-nyah-nyahing which the right wing Republicons persist in using as their chief mode of expression has twanged the world-wide-wire and driven said world to confer upon Obama a Nobel Peace Prize.
An honor, to be sure. But not just for him.
It's also for the American people (a decided majority of 'em, anyway) who, in a spasm of sense, broke the grip of its somnambulist state and elected an articulate, able statesperson, a true and valuable symbol of the American promise and the hope of Democracy.
As the predictable mobs of crypto-racist/sexually repressed obstructionists coagulate around the recipient, the Norwegian Nobel committee has acted unilaterally and struck a blow for the rest of humanity.
The big tent Republicon party, which shelters everyone from flat-earthers to Taitz birthers, from gun-toters to Swift Boaters, in other words every scrap of social flotsam which identifies with the right's disdain for All Things Other, is coming away from its stakes. The kamikaze conservatives thought it prudent to let the grassroots berserkers make headway with their scary ranting and thick-skulled patriotism but realized too late that that strategy has a cannibalistic blow back and now they are, as Edie McClurg says in Planes, Trains and Automobiles: fucked.
Good. Let it be so. For while bestowing laurels upon Obama may strike some as premature, what is long overdue are the consequences for the right's premeditated assault on reason and sanity, consequences which have a satisfying irony.
Conservatives are finally reducing their carbon footprint. And that deserves a prize.