I love Barack Obama, and am very proud that he is our President.  The night he was elected, I felt a peculiarly American feeling of honor and pride, that my fellow Americans had it in them to do the right thing and vote for the Democrat.  To take a stand and say, “No, we are not happy with how the people in charge have run things, and we wish to make a change.”  The fact that that Democrat was half-black and our nation faced down its horrific racial past and voted for the right man for the job made me cry, both on election night and during his inaugural speech.

I felt a great deal of hope in the aftermath of his election.  I still feel a percentage of that hope today, that it’s going to be okay, that, once again, my fellow Americans will do the right thing and work for the greater good.  That we will make smart decisions.  That we will listen, work towards compromise, and fix the many ills that currently ravage the Land of the Free.

Does this mean Barack Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded early Friday morning?  Absolutely not.

Let me say that a different way: hell fucking no.

So far, Barack Obama has become a worldwide political rock star.  He has gotten under the skin of uppity, self-righteous conservative commentators.  He has tricked the more paranoid among us into believing revolution is afoot, and ammunition sales are off the charts.

He has also not accomplished anything yet, aside from getting a professor and a police officer to sit down with him at the White House and discuss their differences over a cold beer.

He oversees two wars, and is on the verge of vastly increasing troop levels in one of those campaigns.  The American political conversation is still one in which the ones shouting the loudest are the ones that are heard and talked about the most. 

Europeans love him, and even Hugo Chavez seems to be something of a fan.  But have you heard of this guy Morgan Tsvangirai? 

He is the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, and the leader and founder of that country’s Movement for Democratic Change.  He challenged one of the world’s worst despots and among the last Big Men of Africa, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, a man he once supported, in two “free” elections, and has attempted for the last ten years to free his country from Mugabe’s ruthless totalitarian rule.

He “won” the election in 2008, but because he didn’t win over fifty percent of the votes in what many believe was a corrupt ballot-counting process that cheated him of that majority, a run-off election was planned.  Tsvangirai ultimately backed out of this second round of voting on account of widespread violence and intimidation from Mugabe’s supporters.

He has been detained and tortured by Mugabe’s police, has been the subject of numerous supposed assassination plots, and earlier this year he was in a car accident of indeterminate nature, about which foul play is suspected, that killed his wife Susan.

In spite of all of this, he continues to work for a peaceful resolution to the mutant poverty, widespread corruption, political violence, and hyper-inflation that plague Zimbabwe.

That resume seems a little more deserving than Obama’s, no?

Several commentators have claimed the noble thing for Obama to do is return the Nobel Peace Prize gracefully and give a speech in which he thanks the Nobel committee for choosing him but declares himself unworthy of such an honor this early in his presidency.  After all, the end date for nominations for the prize was February 1, ten days after he was inaugurated as President.

Personally, I hope Obama does not do this.  Here is a guy who has as much potential as it is possible to have and has, as of this moment, done little with it.  That sounds very familiar to me, an intelligent, well-read American who has been told for years, as far back as he can remember, that he could do whatever he set his mind to but, as of this moment, has done little with all that supposed potential.  Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize so early in his presidency gives hope to slackers like me everywhere that, one day in the future, we will be lauded, praised, and showered with awards for having done little more than possess the potential to one day accomplish many great things.

Obama, therefore, can now add spoiled slackers to the list of those inspired by his rise to prominence.  If he can win the Peace Prize for doing little to encourage peace other than, of course, talking a big game, then perhaps one day too I will be awarded for talking pretty and hoping that ends up being enough to succeed in our world.