Former Vice President of the United States, Academy Award Winner, Candidate for President, Nobel Peace Prize Winner. Throw all of those out. You can just call him Al. Big fat, lying, manipulative Al. The Goracle, as he's been dubbed by many on my side of the aisle, has received the Nobel Peace Prize. That Prize is a running gag at this point, having been given to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter in the past.

The Nobel Prize Website has the pathetic news. Michelle Malkin and Jay from Stop the ACLU have some of the better stuff though. Example? What the Czech President said about climate change:

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

Those are some pretty radical and sobering words from a man who leads a nation ravaged by war and communism for years. I support giving this man a Nobel Peace Prize for that amount of clarity. On the serious matter of who deserved the prize, Captain Ed weighs in:

Who else could have won the Nobel prize, if the committee wanted to promote peace and freedom rather than political allies? Well, perhaps they may have considered the hundreds, if ot thousands of monks in Burma who just sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of non-violent regime change. One or more of the people involved in the six-nation talks that has avoided war over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programs would have also seemed a more germane choice.

Personally, I don't know who should win the prize, mainly because I think war is one of the steps on the way to peace many times. I believe history will prove President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to be peacemakers. The liberal left would have none of that, but perhaps that's why I like it so much.