Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

I caught a lucky break when the Nobel Prize Committee convened a few months ago and I had one of my top investigative agents in Oslo checking out a prospective scandal in the herring tidbit industry, which turned out to be a wild goose (or is it fish?) chase. But, when my man got a whiff of Obama being in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize he contacted me (we use encrypted e-mails) and I set some wheels in motion.

After some tricky maneuvers, I managed to get my man imbedded as a men’s room attendant, thus making him (covertly) privy to some candid conversations, literally history in the making. The first thing I learned was that Obama had some stiff competition from the three other candidates: Senator Al Franken, documentarian Michael Moore and Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi.

The first problem was with Franken who, though a bitter foe of George Bush (which endeared him to the Prize Committee) was basically an unknown in Norway. To help with Franken’s name recognition the Committee retained the Minnesota chapter of Acorn to do some polling. But when Acorn came back with more than nine million votes for Franken in Oslo, it raised some concern with the Committee’s poll watchers since Oslo had a population of only slightly over four million. Thus Senator Franken was set aside temporarily with the promise from the Committee that he would be in the running for the next Nobel Peace Prize along with Dan Rather and Charley Rangel.

Actually, Michael Moore had the prize won, but refused to take a shower and put on a clean shirt, suit and tie for the reception, which he thought would make him look like a capitalist. A melee occurred when an unnamed Nobel Laureate tried to hose him down and Moore had to be airlifted back to the French Riviera.

Everything about Gadhafi was weird. Firstly, it turned out that that odd little hat he always wore wasn’t a hat at all, but a hair transplant gone wrong. Secondly, and this might have killed the prize for him, his first language was Esperanto thus making his Arabic so convoluted that one of his translators nearly bit his tongue off straightening out a sentence which began: “ When - or perhaps, if and when” - and ended some one hundred eighty-eight words later with, “Barbara Bush - or was it maybe Barbra Streisand.”

All in all envisioning our president in the pantheon of Nobelists falling in line right after Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat and Al Gore, makes me feel that Obama wasn’t so bad a choice after all.