...In an article published on this site at the time, Victor Davis Hanson answered this question very usefully. Thanks to its oil wealth, he explained, "Norway has the leisure to be utopian. ... So Norway loves to give award to all sorts of right-thinking frauds (Menchu), scoundrels (Elbaradei), terrorists (Arafat), Stalinists (Le Doc Tho), Elmer Gantrys (Jimmy Carter) and hucksters (Gore) -- as it sits in judgment of others from Lala land." Other, bigger countries are compelled to be realistic about the world; Norway can afford to serve up sanctimonious, more-virtuous-than-thou abstractions -- and to award "effort and intention, not achievement." Hanson suggested that the reader imagine Norway "as the son or daughter of a movie star, one who grew up in Malibu, and feels so terribly about it that he lectures the U.S. about everything from global warming to George Bush's assorted sins -- confident that he will never have to work at Ace Hardware, and never have to live near South Central L.A. That sums up Norway."

As someone who has lived in Norway for over ten years, I can testify that Hanson is right on the money. As Obama's big day in Oslo approaches, however, I feel compelled to add a footnote or two -- not to contradict Hanson, but rather to support and perhaps amplify his points. One key point, for example, is that it is impossible to underestimate the degree to which Norwegians have it drummed into their heads from infancy on that Norway is "the world's richest country" as well as "the world's best country to live in." There is no doubt in their minds that this is true, because, after all, the UN says so, and in no country on earth (this has, incidentally, been proven by a survey) do the people revere the UN more than they do in Norway...

...Anyway, it seems clear that all of this -- the indifference (and even hostility) to individual achievement in the schoolroom and beyond, the preference for empty peace-and-love rhetoric over tough, intelligent realpolitik, the prioritization of social-democratic communalism over personal responsibility, the readiness to bow and scrape to bullying tyrants in the name of "peace," and the pathetic eagerness to be seen by those bullying tyrants as a pretty little "butterfly" on the world stage -- all this makes far more comprehensible the Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to hand one of their medals to a man who has snubbed America's democratic friends and eulogized its autocratic foes, who is all too eager to foist socialist solutions on a republic founded on individual liberty, and whose résumé, while light on real-world accomplishments, is heavy on high-minded yap about peace and dialogue. I suppose one can only be glad that the lepidoptera in Oslo don't also pass out the prizes for chemistry, physics, and medicine.