In their editorial “Not Nobel Winners” The Wall Street Journal offers some perspective on what a joke it was to award the “peace” prize to Forest Gore (Mama always said, everybody but me and my jetsetting friends should use less energy).

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These men and women put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression. Let us hope they survive the coming year so that the Nobel Prize Committee might consider them for the 2008 award.

As Bill Kristol noted on Fox News Sunday, Gore won the award merely for bloviating about the environment in a movie. But that’s typical of the left – talking about an issue or making a symbolic gesture is just as good as actually doing something.

So Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (shared with the IPCC), which obviously isn’t much to do with peace at all – it’s become more of a “Celebrity Lefty of the Year” prize – since spreading Gore’s hysterical, apocalyptic environmental propaganda seems to have no connection to promoting peace. It’s sort of like the contest for student body president or prom queen at a very liberal high school. Gore is simply the most popular boy this year among the international left-wing jet set.

Gore joins such luminaries as Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, Bush-bashing failed former President Jimmy Carter, and fabulist Rigoberta Menchu. Prestigious company indeed.

If the prize were really an apolitical recognition of efforts to promote world peace, then Ronald Reagan would certainly have won for winning the Cold War, and President Bush would have at least been seriously considered for the prize, having liberated two nations, and tens of millions of people, from tyrannical regimes.

After recently floating a trial balloon about a plan to give every child born in America $5,000, this week Hillary Clinton is proposing to give away $1,000 to any American who earns up to $60,000, purportedly as part of the 401(k) program. Alas, if you make between $60,000 and $100,000, your vote is only worth 500 bucks. She is literally offering to buy our votes with our own money. Or actually, with our neighbors’ money. Far too many Americans who wouldn’t be convinced to cough up more of their own hard-earned cash, nevertheless are more than willing to reach into the pockets of their fellow citizens. Really, much of the Democrats’ program essentially amounts to vote-buying, but Hillary is being particularly flagrant with it.

If Hillary offered any of her own funds in exchange for votes, it would be blatantly illegal. But she can offer as much cash as she’s able to confiscate from others with reckless abandon. And somewhere near a majority of our fellow Americans, plus or minus a few percent, will eat it up and vote for this quasi-Marxist hackery.

(Demonstrating that she truly is a visionary, Hillary said she would encourage employers to have direct deposit from paychecks into the accounts. Uh, that’s how 401(k) plans work now. Hillary Clinton – so out of touch with the little people.)

The Senate has become an increasingly ugly place under Democrat “leadership”, with Democrats trying to replicate all the class of their sleazy, dishonest nutroots supporters. This may be good for fund-raising, but it is not good for the nation. They ought to be ashamed, if only they had any shame.

On Monday, Senators Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama (all three who incidentally avoided serving in the military. Chickenhawks!), along with 38 other Senate Democrats, attacked radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh for allegedly insulting members of the U.S. military, based on an utter falsehood, a totally out of context quote spread around by left-wing propaganda website (and Clinton ally) Media Matters (The transcript of Limbaugh’s original comments is here).

Senator Tom Harkin, who ironically has engaged in repeated fabrications about his own military service, clearly a man with no class or honor, decided to take a mean-spirited, compassionless, low-blow shot at Mr. Limbaugh’s past problems with addiction to prescription painkillers, proving only once again that liberal claims of compassion and tolerance are a total fraud.

If only the Democrats had as much interest in defeating al Qaeda as they do in defeating conservative talk radio hosts.