Courage and integrity

 The indispensable JoeMyGod remembered and posted this today:

Wasn't that gracious, despite the obligatory bit about "strongly supported me"?  That was last January.  How do you think he feels about Maria Corina Machado now that she has won the Nobel Peace Prize?

In its announcement the Nobel Committee wrote, "Democracy is a precondition for lasting peace.  However, we live in a world where democracy is in retreat, where more and more authoritarian regimes are challenging norms and resorting to violence."  Sir!  They remembered you after all.

Let me quote my very own representative Earl "Buddy" Carter , doing obeisance to Trump for Bringing Peace to the Middle East:  "I'm introducing a resolution today that will honor him with the Nobel Peace Prize, and if need be, we'll call for a discharge petition."  We're so lucky here in the Georgia First.  By the way, Buddy is not related to Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter, who actually made progress in Middle East peace by brokering the Menachem Begin-Anwar Sadat agreement which ended hostilities between Israel and Egypt.  Buddy seems to think a discharge petition in the US House will somehow show the Norwegians the error of their ways.  He can always order his own "Prize," with chocolate inside.

Nominations by unsavory characters like Buddy and Bibi didn't impress the Committee but all is not lost.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Politico Europe that he will lobby to get Trump the bauble he yearns for if he sends Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine as they discussed at the UN.  The president believes that being able to hit targets up to 1,500 km inside Russia would encourage serious peace negotiations.  "I didn't hear a no," Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv.  Trump just has to run it by his boss in Moscow.

Until next year Trump will have to make do with encomia like this, from diaper undersecretary Steven Cheung:  "He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will."  It sounded better in the original Korean on Kim Jong-un's birthday.

Speaking of totalitarian regimes, Secretary of Warfighting and Day-drinking Hegseth has announced, "We're signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Airbase in Idaho."  Apparently the United Arab Emirates are now our defense partners, too, which means we can expect to hear about splendiferous Trump hotels in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.  MAGA doesn't know whether to shit or go blind, as my Uncle Frank the farmer used to say.  "I guess [declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization] isn't going to happen, since we just gave them an air base in Idaho," Laura Loomer wrote.  "No foreign country should have a military base on US soil."  She's certain that "savages from Qatar" will be "implementing Sharia law in the US."  Calm down, says former Hegseth aide Dan Caldwell, it's pretty common:  "Singapore has a similar facility and detachment for its F-15 training unit at the very same airbase."  But Singapore doesn't give MAGA nightmares.  Last I heard, Idaho was especially AMERICA FIRST!

"In our work as policymakers who strive for democracy and human rights in the face of dictatorial regimes in the Western Hemisphere and beyond, we have rarely witnessed such courage, selflessness and firm grasp of morality as we have in Maria Corina Machado," says a letter on the Senate website of Rick Scott.  The nominating letter from last spring was signed by Marco Rubio, Scott and UN ambassador Mike Waltz.  Has Trump seen it yet?  This could be fun.

So Machado is not "someone nobody has heard of," as MAGA mouths have been screaming all day.  That would be Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist who won the prize for literature.  They do this every year, sending us casual readers scrambling.  Krasznahorkai was called "a master of the apocalypse" by Susan Sontag and a unique stylist whose sentences are longer than Faulkner's, in one case stretching for an entire book.  "In the midst of apocalyptic terror [he] reaffirms the power of art," said the Swedish Academy's citation, and I say just in time.  Bela Tarr made one of his novels into a film, Satantango, which is over seven hours long.  And you thought The Irishman was self-indulgent.

Trump's "Compact for Academic Excellence" is worse than I thought.  In return for limiting international student enrollments, adhering to 19th century definitions of gender and preventing anyone from "belittling" right wing talking points, nine top-drawer universities were offered easier access to federal money.  MIT, where John Trump taught physics (as his functionally illiterate nephew never ceases to boast), was the first to tell them where to stick it.  That leaves Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, University of Arizona, University of Southern California, UVA, UT Austin and Vanderbilt (whose paper is wonderfully named The Vanderbilt Hustler).  I urge them to hang together in rejecting this bribe, lest they all hang separately.

In conclusion:

THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1906)

WOODROW WILSON (1919)

JIMMY CARTER (2002)

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA (2009)

NOT TRUMP (2025)