Re: There's always organizations that have been doing good work for decades. - Edit 2
Before modification by Sidious at 14/10/2009 07:30:35 AM
The other two candidates were Sarkozy and Tsvangirai. Sarkozy has seriously done nothing for peace, and Tsvangirai is a puppet for a still reigning tyrant.
There's no one who's contributed seriously to world peace in the past year, but of those three I'd also choose Obama.
I'd give out the Peace prize once every 5 or 10 years if I had a choice. From the trends, it seems that such exceptional human beings don't appear on an annual basis, and the award invariably cheapens due to poor availability of candidates.
So you can't tell me that there were no serious or deserving candidates - MSF, Red Cross, Amnesty International, Oxfam and many others are there even if nobody else is, and I'm sure there are many people who've been doing good work, even if it's in smaller countries that don't get much media attention. People have gotten the Nobel Prize in recent years for promoting the peace in Timor-Leste, in Guatemala, and other small countries; there's no reason why the committee has to pick someone famous or known worldwide.
The Nobel Prize is for individual or dual success... they don't award groups, and they wouldn't award the head of a group who would take credit for the actions of many. Sometimes they mention groups alongside the laureat, but never award it solely.