I don't know that the committee would laugh at the nomination of Bush. After all, they awarded Trimble, De Klerk, Arafat, and some others who I thought pretty questionable. I couldn't agree more about the pope, though. Even from a (liberal) Catholic perspective, he has been a disaster to the human rights and peace agenda.

I think this is a great choice, but there are so many women like Shirin Ebadi around the world, one wonders why the committee decided to reward a Muslim woman fighting fundamentalism this year? It strikes me as window dressing of the sort the committee engaged in with the decision to award "opposing sides" in Ireland, South Africa, and the Arab/Israeli wars. The award going to Hume and Trimble in Ireland was a sick joke, IMO. And I don't know why de Klerk was awarded--he was a minor player who happened to be in the right place in the right time in history, to hand over the keys to the country to Nelson Mandela. And Arafat and Rabin? My god, what WERE they thinking?

I dunno. I don't think the Nobel committee is fulfilling it's mission with any conviction these days when it comes to the Peace Prize. Certainly not when you compare the awards in the other fields. I was very pleased to see the Medicine prize go to the men who invented the MRI. I heard an interview with one of them, and it was just so heartening, the way they said no one in the field of medicine believed it could be done--that the scientists reacted to their research as if they had said "we used hocus pocus magic, the omens, and an alchemist" to develop the technology.

Of course, the very conservative, status quo, conventional wisdom nature of the committee makes the award pretty damn problematic, IMO. I mean, why did Toni Morrison win the prize for literature over Gloria Naylor, the much better writer, when the committee decided it was time to award a black American female writer? Answer: Toni Morrison works at Princeton, who lobbies very hard for their Nobel candidates.

Call me cynical, but...