I'm fully aware this is way old news by now, but I just got caught up in Google Reader on Matt Taibbi's excellent column, and his analysis of the Nobel Committee's strange decision is too good to miss.  Some key excerpts are below, but really, you should read the whole thing.

How do we do things? We keep the troops in those faraway places like Afghanistan and Iraq, sure, but while we do that we make sure to extol things like tolerance and dialogue and the spirit of diplomacy. We make sure that the same people who were not involved in the decision-making process during the previous bombing runs under Bush are in the loop again, now and hopefully forever. We smile a lot and say nice things about the Geneva convention and the impropriety of torture and secret detention, the importance of the rule of international law. We make everybody feel better about how things are going to go from now on.

This is what Barack Obama did to “earn” the Nobel Prize. He put the benevolent face back on things. He is a good-looking black law professor with an obvious bent for dialogue and discussion and inclusion. That he hasn’t actually reversed any of Bush’s more notorious policies — hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, hasn’t ended secret detentions, hasn’t amped down Iraq or Afghanistan — is another matter. What he has done is remove the stink of unilateralism from those policies.

They’re not crazy-ass, blatantly illegal, lunatic rampages anymore, but carefully-considered, collectively-run peacekeeping actions, prosecuted with meaningful input from our allies. You see the difference? The Nobel committee sure did!

The unifying thread for all these prizewinners is that they were all important political figures who at one time or another embraced violence as a just and appropriate policy, and got the peace crown once the political weather changed and it was time to put the tanks back in the garage. Even Gore, during the Kosovo war, boned up on his war cred before he got a prize for losing an election, growing a beard, and making a freaking movie. And hey, maybe in the real world, you can’t punish politicians for embracing force — maybe there’s just no way around the use of violence, when you’re running a country the size of the U.S. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been President or Vice President of anything

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The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle:

Forgive me if I am skeptical that the government is going to show GM how to streamline its bureaucracy.  Nor do governments historically have a good record as cutting-edge auto designers.

All the government can give GM is money.  Our money.  Perhaps we should change the name to American Leyland.

As one commenter notes, GM has every possibility of becoming Obama’s Vietnam.

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When explaining his cabinet choices yesterday, president-elect Barack Obama had this to say:

"I assembled this team because I am a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions. I think that's how the best decisions are made. One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in group-think and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views. So I am going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House. But understand, I will be setting policy as president. I will be responsible for the vision that this team carries out, and I will expect them to implement that vision once decisions are made."

Such a good lesson here: if more organizations would create leadership teams where civilized dissent and debate is encouraged instead of actively vetted out, you’d see sounder, stronger, more founded decisions come from them.

All too often, the exact opposite happens: key leaders surround themselves with old boys and yes men, then everyone acts surprised when shallow, ill-conceived decisions and policies are made.

It takes a tremendous amount of strength to allow your ideas to be challenged and, often, shot down.  It requires an ego checking-at-the door and an intellectual fortitude that few people truly have.  Many say this is what they want, but when it happens, they balk.  I’ve seen it firsthand more times than I can remember.

True leaders surround themselves with people as smart as or smarter than them for this very reason.

Then again, there’s a reason we see so few true leaders.

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The Anchorage Daily News endorses Obama.

It is Sen. Obama who truly promises fundamental change in Washington. You need look no further than the guilt-by-association lies and sound-bite distortions of the degenerating McCain campaign to see how readily he embraces the divisive, fear-mongering tactics of Karl Rove. And while Sen. McCain points to the fragile success of the troop surge in stabilizing conditions in Iraq, it is also plain that he was fundamentally wrong about the more crucial early decisions. Contrary to his assurances, we were not greeted as liberators; it was not a short, easy war; and Americans -- not Iraqi oil -- have had to pay for it. It was Sen. Obama who more clearly saw the danger ahead. The unqualified endorsement of Sen. Obama by a seasoned, respected soldier and diplomat like Gen. Colin Powell, a Republican icon, should reassure all Americans that the Democratic candidate will pass muster as commander in chief.

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Tell me if you can detect the parallels between McCain's erratic, ridiculous campaign and the story of Ashley Todd, 20, who claimed she was assaulted by a black man who carved a "B" in her face (which stands for 'Barack') because he saw a GOP sticker on her car.

A campaign worker who claimed she was the victim of a politically-motivated attack in which she was beaten, kicked and cut, now admits that she made the whole story up. According to Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard, Ashley Todd, 20, told investigators today that she "was not robbed and there was no 6'4" black male attacker." Todd initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield Wednesday night and that the suspect began beating her after seeing a John McCain bumper sticker on her car. Todd claimed that the mugger even cut a backwards letter "B" in her cheek. But today investigators say Todd confessed that the attack never happened.

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Here's a walking, talking example of human ignorance explaining to PBS's "Now on PBS" why she dislikes Barack Obama based strictly on (incredibly irrational) "religious" grounds. Money quote: "I can't imagine a President of the United States being named President Obama. I really have a problem with that, and I'm not the only one." [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4wQfQtpDAc] This election has brought so much nonsense to the surface. I couldn't dream this stuff up if I sat here and tried. (via Chris)

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