We’ve already seen the Nobel Peace Prize folks render their offering moot in the last few years, but this exemplifies its Cracker Jack box prize significance.

Five Norwegian politicians sent a surprising but unambiguous message Friday, bestowing one of the world’s most coveted honors on President Obama as a signal of the Western world’s repudiation of the presidency of George W. Bush and its embrace of a softer but still untested American foreign policy.

As word of the stunning Nobel Peace Prize selection began to take hold Friday, Americans struggled to digest the news that some first mistook for a prank and others saw as an overreach, given that the president had been in office only 12 days when he was nominated for the award.

“Stunning”, that’s one way to put it.

The award was “a sigh of collective relief that George Bush is no longer here,” said Aaron David Miller, an adviser on Middle East issues to six presidents. More than any concrete contribution Mr. Obama has made to world peace, the prize embodies “the international community’s love affair” with a young, charismatic president who “listens, not lectures,” he added.

What “a sigh of collective relief that George Bush is no longer here,” signifies is that we no longer have a President who does what he believes is the right thing to do, rather than what a bunch of spineless socialist countries in Europe want us to do in order to save their collective skins.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon agreed that the Nobel announcement represented a symbolic welcoming of the new American approach.

“President Obama embodies the new spirit of dialogue and engagement on the world’s biggest problems - climate change, nuclear disarmament and a wide range of peace and security challenges,” he said.

Cap ‘n Trade, Government as an ultimately failing super-bureaucracy to replace HMOs, kindness to terrorists and terror sponsoring governments, plundering of the taxpayer to provide “stimulus” for every liberal concern, agenda, project and pipe dream in existence…

The president’s political supporters welcomed such sentiments as a sign that Mr. Obama was delivering on his promise to rekindle relations between the U.S. and its top allies. To others, though, the shock of the announcement came in seeing so esteemed an award handed out before Mr. Obama even had time to build a tangible record of accomplishment that might justify it.

Mark Salter, an author and longtime adviser to Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, called the decision “morally reprehensible,” even if Mr. Obama himself was not at fault.

“No president’s statecraft, whether you agree with its direction or not, can be expected to bear fruit in less than nine months,” Mr. Salter said. “I think the morally correct and politically shrewd response from the White House would have been to refuse the honor.”

Well, Saddam Barack Hussein is politically shrewd, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to be elected dog catcher, let alone president, but morally correct? Nah! You have to possess some sense of morality to be morally anything, exccept, of course, for morally bankrupt, and O, well…

What struck an especially ironic chord with some Republicans was the Nobel committee’s suggestion that Mr. Obama’s call for a nuclear weapons-free world “has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.” It was Mr. Bush, they said, who persevered with dramatic reductions in the world’s nuclear arms stockpiles begun under President Clinton.

So what? “The One” doesn’t mind borrowing from past POTUSes when it suits his purposes, even from the Bush Administration, witness the surveillance policies he retained, the same ones he deplored during his election campaign.

Of course, the usual suspects could be counted upon to see sense in O’s getting the prize.

After recovering from their initial shock, leaders around the globe applauded Friday’s surprise award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, saying they hoped the prize would spur his efforts on nuclear disarmament and peacemaking in some of the world’s most violent places.

Calling the honor “well-deserved,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen hailed Mr. Obama’s “strong commitment to help build peace and defend fundamental human rights, including through the Atlantic alliance.” Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called it “an unexpected but inspired choice.”

Inspired, huh? Yeah, if the Nobel Committee hadn’t already degraded the value of the prize over the last few years (I’m surprised they haven’t issued one to Howdy Doody by now), I suppose one could ask, “What the hell inspired them to give it to Obama!?”

But reaction to the news was mixed both at home and abroad, with some critics calling the award political and others calling it premature. At least one former Peace Prize laureate said that the president - nominated for the prize just days after he entered the White House in January - had not earned the honor.

“Who? Obama? So fast? Too fast - he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet,” said Poland’s Lech Walesa, the 1983 winner who spent a year in jail after he helped found Solidarity, the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union.

“For the time being, Obama’s just making proposals,” Mr. Walesa said.

Yeah, along with burying our economy, force feeding us socialism, kissing hindquarters in enemy territory…