Current Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize four years ago on his ascension to the American Presidency for his flowery rhetoric during his campaign tour of Europe.  (I’ll skip over his…flowery…behaviors in pursuing his own agenda in the ensuing years.)  Now the European Union also has received the accolade, for—flowery rhetoric?  (I’ll skip over the…flowery…responses within the EU’s member populations to being held accountable for their budgetary decisions.)

As the editorialists of The New York Sun put it,

Our own view is that…[i]creasingly the Nobel Peace Prize is political prop—its recent American winners have been Vice President Gore, President Obama, and President Carter—whose lessening luster will offer little to a European Union that itself has become a shackle of socialism.  It is a sad story.  And maybe some day, it will take a surprising turn.  One can always hope.  We intend no slight to the great strivers for a better Europe when we observe that in the coming generation the dreamers will look elsewhere than Brussels for the beacon of liberty.

There is that similarity, too, it seems.  Those American recipients also have steadfastly tried to move America toward more government control over our economy and over the decisions we individual Americans and our businesses make in that economy.  Indeed, the present administration, with its outright takeover of the one-sixth of our economy represented by the health insurance and health care industries, its ownership of two of the major car companies in our auto manufacturing industry (which ownership this administration is loath to quit), and its diktats to our financial industry, seems bent on a path of interventions associated with corporatism, a sub-genre of socialism.