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OPINION: Obama Nobel Peace Prize Speech Channels George W. Bush (CBS News)
As President Obama wrapped up his remarks at the acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize Thursday, it’s easy to imagine the members of the Nobel Committee saying to themselves, “wait – we gave it to that guy?”
After all, the general consensus among commentators was that Mr. Obama had won the prize because he represented such a change from his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose rhetoric and foreign policy were anathema to most Europeans.
And yet while Mr. Obama offered a nuanced speech laying out what some have already started to call an Obama Doctrine, he also made an unmistakable argument for the legitimacy of war – sometimes using the sort of phrases that called to mind the very words of the man he replaced.
“Evil does exist in the world,” Mr. Obama said as part of a long argument in favor of the concept of a “just war.”
That line brought to mind Mr. Bush’s repeated invocation of evil – including his argument in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
President Obama said there are times when “the use of force [is] not only necessary but morally justified”; he argued that he “cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.”
FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK FOR CBS NEWS: Obama Nobel Peace Prize Speech Channels George W. Bush – Political Hotsheet – CBS News.
