Forehead slapping time

So, Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize. But why? Not only has he only been in office for less than a year, but:

• he's still got the two wars going, and they are far from resolved.
• he will not be able to close Guantanamo when he said he would.
  
• he's completely reneged on his campaign promises of transparency and accountability for Bush-era abuses, including civil liberties and torture. See here (via Harinder) for an account of how Obama--with the help of a Democratic Congress--is actually continuing the war on transparency that began with the Bush administration.

Worst of all, this sort of thing will give Obama the cover to continue Bush's policies, making it harder to hold his feet to the fire on the campaign pledges he's broken. The whole thing is really heart-rending, really, because it likely means that we're just stuck with this awful, brutal, secretive government for a long time to come--a government that infantilizes its citizenry, assuming the role of arbiter of what we need to know.

Ultimately, though, the blame resides with the citizenry itself. The idea that our government tortures people and acts upon information gathered from torture is no longer seen as something dispicable, morally reprehensible, and a practice that characterizes only the most brutal and oppressive regimes. Instead, it's seen as a mere partisan talking point--a point on which reasonable people can disagree. But it's just awful. It proves that we are a savage people.

PS: This reminds me of when Micheal Moore won the Cannes Film Festival for Fahrenheit 9/11, which was not a particularly great film in any respect. It was pretty obvious that the Cannes people just wanted to make a melodramatic "statement". This seems like the same sort of thing--hey, let's stick it to Bush, they probably thought. Let's reward America for doing an about face and rejecting the Bush worldview. In the end, though, they just ended up stupidly endorsing a slew of positions held by Obama that are indistinguishable from those held by Bush. Ack.