Proving that there's no one they won't rally behind if it allows them to criticize Obama, Fox News has joined the still-relatively-scarce calls for Russian Prime Minister President Emperor Whatever Vladimir Putin to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his spearheading, if that's what you want to call it, of the effort to take international control of Syria's supply of chemical weapons.
Some even go one step further, suggesting that Obama should turn his own Nobel, which even I'll admit he barely earned, over to Putin--since compared to the guy who last week was getting ready to bomb people, Putin is obviously the real man of peace here.
It's all fairly silly, of course, but this morning I heard someone on NPR, I'm not sure whom, make the case that the United States should want nothing more than for Putin to win a Nobel--because it will mean we've pushed him, through his own pettiness and egotism, to become a better leader.
I have a friend at work who's very into the Myers-Briggs personality matrix--INTP, ENFJ, all that stuff. I've never really been that interested in it--not that I don't think it makes a certain degree of sense, but I prefer to take people on a case-by-case basis rather than attempting to fit them into some sort of personality box, accurate or otherwise. After working with me pretty closely for a couple months, my friend decided that I'm an INTJ--intuition, something, something, judgment. As you can see, I still wasn't too interested.
But one thing I thought was interesting was that the INTJ profile he showed me mentioned Putin as a famous example of the INTJ type (which is actually fairly rare). So I've been feeling an odd sense of kinship with the piece of shit for the last couple months.
And make no mistake--he is a piece of shit. "Egotist" is the least critical word I can think of to describe him. Which is why the Nobel idea really isn't half bad. At the end of the day, it really doesn't mean a damned thing--obviously, since they basically gave it to Obama for being black and popular at the same time. So if stroking his ego a bit actually motivates him to take the whip he's got hanging over Syria and crack it a couple times, and in the process save thousands of lives (or at the very least, rid the world of some chemical weapons), then by all means--give him a fucking Eagle Scout badge while we're at it. He can have mine.
Could Obama have handled this Syria situation better from the beginning? Probably. But that Obama is willing to take advantage of a good idea that he didn't necessarily have himself is a sign, to me, that he actually does care about helping the people of Syria, instead of just looking like a big, decisive, tough guy. You know who was decisive as hell? George W. Bush.
I've said here before that I think when you're the president of a country like ours, there are some situations where there simply are no good answers, and good leadership is about knowing which decision damns you the least. So when it comes to war, and potentially killing innocent people to get at the less-innocent ones, I think a little indecision is damned refreshing.
Further Reading
Vladimir Putin, The Next Nobel Peace Prize Winner?
Putin is the one who really deserves that Nobel Peace Prize
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