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The Republican National Committee chairman can be counted upon to lose no opportunity to rain on President Obama's parade. Take, for a recent example, the awarding of this year's Nobel Peace Medal to Barack Obama. The Nobel Committee's statement in making the award made clear that it was given in recognition of our new President's new style of diplomacy, which is open, multilateral, and profoundly different from the stone age style which preceded his term for the previous eight years. Nobody, least of all Barack Obama himself, claimed he had yet earned the Nobel distinction, but it does constitute the "audacity of hope."The RNC chair dependably blasted the Nobel award, and the President as well, while managing to repeat the Republican litany of everything they think Barack Obama has done wrong: increasing the Federal deficit (far less than they increased it under his predecessor); proposing new health care options (the present options having given us the worst quality of health care among developed nations); and not resolving the two wars which his predecessor unwisely first entered and then escalated.
None of these criticisms, of course, have much to do with the Nobel award; only the last one is even tangentially related, and even so it is very unfair to blame Barack Obama for not yet being unable to undo the damage of the eight year nightmare produced by Bush and Cheney. Here was an opportunity for the RNC Chair to display statesmanlike conduct, to recognize an honor when it was given to the President, even to congratulate him on receiving that honor with humility and hope. Instead, the RNC chair was petty, spiteful, and malicious -- none of which is surprising, as he has been petty, spiteful, and malicious ever since he took over his present post. Shame on him, and on the RNC.
