It used to be that a Nobel Peace Prize meant something--until Yasir Arafat and JImmy Carter won one.

Andrew McCarthy makes this point very eloquently.

As expertly explained in an important essay by Gabriel Schoenfeld in the March 2006 issue of Commentary, the publication of at least some of the stories the media have chosen to honor may be felony violations of the federal espionage act, which proscribes the revelation of certain national defense secrets, including signals intelligence (which is at the heart of the NSA-surveillance program disclosed by Risen and Lichtblau in December 2005). If you buy that we are at war (and 150,000 young Americans in harm's way would suggest to some that we are), if you buy that we are confronting an enemy hell-bent on murdering as many of us as possible (as nearly 3,000 dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the wreckage of Flight 93 would seem to attest), this kind of reporting is not praiseworthy; it is incomprehensible.

The logic behind this is that prestige of a prize like the Pulitzer launders the stink out of the indefensible, but the reality is that the stink remains and contaminates the prize as well.

McCarthy alludes to the Barry Bond's controversy, but I think of the Utah 2002 gold medal for ice dancing where a French skating judge colluded with a Russian judge to insure that the Russians beat out the Canadian team of Sale and Pelletier. Since the French judge's marks were dropped, Sale & Pelletier tied for gold with Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

The question is--how proud are the Russians of their golds knowing that they'll always have an asterisk hanging above them?

Liberals, in their zeal to preserve the power, are in fact destroying the institutions that otherwise might have served them well.