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Nobel secretary finally realizes that awarding Obama with ‘the prize’ wasn’t such a great idea

January 4, 2019 | | Print Article
Photo credit JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

Breaking the tradition of the secretive Nobel Commission, former secretary Geir Lundestad admitted that Barack Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 in the hope that it would strengthen his presidency.

Not only did Lundestad acknowledge that the decision was purely political during an interview with the AP news agency, but he suggested that in hindsight it wasn’t such a grand idea.

Meanwhile, the prestige of a Nobel Peace Prize is all but finished, as Fox News host Laura Ingraham noted online.

“Seven years later the Nobel Secretary catches on to the obvious. Obama’s receiving the Peace Prize diminished the award forever,” she tweeted.

Lundestad dished on the the controversial decision — Obama had been in office just eight months and had accomplished very little — in his memoir, “Secretary of Peace.”

“No Nobel Peace Prize ever elicited more attention than the 2009 prize to Barack Obama,” Lundestad wrote, according to the BBC.

“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake,” he says. “In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

He also said Obama considered not going to Oslo, Norway, to receive the award, as is customary — a rare occasion that usually happens when dissidents are held back by their governments.

“In the White House they quickly realized that they needed to travel to Oslo,” wrote Lundestad.

Obama still broke with tradition, angering some Norwegians when he skipped other activities, including lunch with the king, a news conference and CNN interview with the prize recipient, the Boston Globe reported.

He also blew off a “Save the Children’’ benefit concert, where organizers reportedly placed him with an Obama cardboard cutout — though there appear to be no photos of this.

Donald Trump Jr. commented on Lundestad’s revelation, tweeting: “Only about a decade after everyone else realized it…”

Here’s a sampling of other responses from Twitter:

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