STILL MORE NOBELONEY. Imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even better, the Chinese government is royally pissed about it. I hope the Prize does Liu and his fellow citizens some good, and I think the best way we could show solidarity would be to develop a sane manufacturing and tariff policy, and stop giving so much of our business to Chinese slave labor factories. (I am not assuaged by the recent boom in Chinese imports of American garbage.)

I doubt political prisoners like the current laureate would be among those arguing that we only harm Chinese hopes of liberty by refusing to feed the regime so many Yankee dollars. So I join the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, PEN, Reporters San Frontieres, and others in support of Liu, and leave the Heritage Foundation and such like to support his Red Chinese slavemasters ("What [Obama] is really saying is that he wants Americans to pay more for Chinese goods").

Conservatives can at least be pleased that President Obama is no longer the reigning laureate, which had them shitting their pants last year. Betsy's Page declares that the choice of Liu means "at long last, the Nobel Peace Prize committee gets it right." The Nobel Committees aren't out of the woods with wingnuts yet, though -- they gave the Medicine Prize to Robert Edwards for his role in developing in vitro fertilization, and the Jesus people are up in arms. (Fear and loathing of test tube babies is enjoying a vogue among social cons.) The win goaded National Review's Kathryn J. Lopez to one of her legendary twittergasms:


But that's okay -- as we've noticed before, conservative psychology relies on sudden swings between delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution. They can rile the troops by telling them that America won big at the Nobel Prizes (which is like the Oscars, except the men have to wear real tuxedos) and, when needed, enrage them with the spectacle of Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in bed together.