What Does Snowden Deserve?

Some say it’s a Nobel Peace Prize:

A pair of Norwegian politicians hailing from their country’s Socialist Left Party have nominated Snowden, arguing that his actions have helped to preserve trust between nations.

Moyihan rolls his eyes:

Remember that flurry of reports in October that “Russian President Vladimir Putin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by an advocacy group that credits him with bringing about a peaceful resolution to the Syrian-U.S. dispute over chemical weapons?”

In 2012, hundreds of news organizations reported on Bradley Manning’s nomination (one of those Norwegian parliamentarians who nominated Snowden also nominated Manning). In 2011, the wires were clogged with stories of a potential Peace Prize gong for Julian Assange. And my personal favorite, courtesy of a former Swedish deputy prime minister and parliamentarian, the 2006 nominations of former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and right-wing polemicist Kenneth Timmerman, author of books on Jesse Jackson, the Iran nuclear program, and how the French “betrayed” America. (On the cover of Timmerman’s book Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, potential readers are told the book is written by “a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.”)

This happens regularly because so many individuals can submit nominations:

[A]ny member of a “national government or legislature” or, say, any philosophy professor—from a member of Hungarian parliament representing the neo-Nazi Jobbik party to the bonkers Slovenian professor Slavoj Žižek—can create fake news by legitimately nominating someone who might be considered illegitimate by reasonable people.

Weigel adds his two cents:

Moynihan follows these fake news explosions more regularly than I do, but I was turned on to them nine years ago. This was when Dr. William Hammesfahr appeared in Florida, describing himself (and allowing news organizations to describe him) as a Nobel Prize nominee as he argued against pulling Terri Schiavo’s plug. A Florida congressman had written a letter recommending him for the prize, and Hammesfahr didn’t possess the self-awareness that usually prevents people from saying they were merely nominated for things. (You can safely ignore any reporter or TED speaker whose bio leads with how he made the short list for something but didn’t win.)