Nor has this been just some partisan sniping. Even Bill Clinton complained about Jimmy Carter's Monday morning quarterbacking that complicated international relations. Among other things, Carter has been chummy with dictators heading a couple of the oldest hard-line Stalinist regimes in the world, those in North Korea and in Cuba. No doubt this too warmed the hearts of those who want to see the United States taken down a peg.
Awarding prizes for political reasons is not new but it has now reached new levels of blatancy and shamelessness. The only comparison that comes to mind is the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty in 1932 after he told the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear about the Soviet Union -- as distinguished from telling them the truth.
One of the most massive, man-made famines in history was claiming millions of lives in the USSR but Walter Duranty's lying and denying set well with the left-leaning intelligentsia of his time and he was rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize. A then unknown young writer named Malcolm Muggeridge was also in the USSR at the same time and he told the truth -- for which he was shunned by the intellectuals when he returned to the West and had trouble finding work.
While the Nobel Prize continues to be the most prestigious in the world -- and deservedly so in fields like science and economics -- the Nobel Peace Prize has already been given to a terrorist thug like Yasser Arafat, so perhaps Jimmy Carter is a worthy successor to him, even if he is one of the sorriest presidents and ex-presidents in the history of the United States.