The Politics of Resentment

Al Gore wins a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, so National Review's Iain Murphy decides that maybe Osama bin Laden should get a Nobel too since he "implicitly endorsed Gore's stance — and that of the Nobel committee — in his September rant from the cave." At first blush, this would appear to belong to the Hitler was a vegetarian line of argumentation, but even that's going to far. Hitler, after all, as best one can tell was sincere in his desire to reduce cruelty to animals. OBL as climate change activist seems about on a par with the idea that Josef Stalin was driven a principled opposition to European colonialism, and that in order to spite him we ought to encourage its perpetual continuation.

Which, come to think of it, actually was the view of National Review and the American conservative movement of the time. Brad DeLong celebrates this occasion by pointing me to National Review's contemporaneous attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Generally speaking, the list of past winners isn't one the American right can have much enthusiasm about.