Jesse Walker explains:

3. Kill a lot of people, then stop. In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. Kissinger's CV included the "secret" bombing of Cambodia and the "Christmas" bombing of North Vietnam; just a month before his prize was announced, he was complicit in the coup that installed a brutal dictatorship in Chile. So why did he win? Because he and Tho had reached a truce to end the Vietnam War. Tho wasn't a particularly peaceful man either, but at least he had the common courtesy to refuse the award.

More recently, the prize went to Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, a man whose career to that point had been spent arranging terrorist assaults on civilians. He shared the award with Israel's Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin; the three of them, like Kissinger and Tho, had negotiated an end to a war. In this case the peace agreement didn't hold, and both the state of Israel and various Palestinian groups went on to produce many more corpses. So don't worry if you develop a taste for blood during the initial stage of your Peace Prize campaign: You're free to resume killing once Mr. Nobel's money is safely in your hands.

You do realize the Peace Prize was given to Kissinger because he was callous enough to accept a deal where the South Vietnamese would be prevented from defending themselves when the NVA
mounted their final offensive.

Kissinger did more to deserve the prize on an average weekend then Gore has done in all his life.

The Nobel "Peace" prize is historically compromised enough that it should no longer be awarded.

My standard comment on this atrocity is,

Q.: "How is the Nobel Peace Prize like a Che t-shirt?"

A.: "If you have one, there's something wrong with you."

MG & McGehee are right.

I've got to humorously wonder (as an alternative to the historical motivations commonly agreed upon) whether swedish Mr. Nobel had it all figured out in advance and knew that any "peace" prize would by human nature descend into self-congratulating propaganda of the most embarrasing kind. Thus he awarded the task of choosing the winner and all the related ceremonial fluff to norwegians. All other Nobel prizes are awarded by the swedish Kungliga Akademien / Royal Academy but according to the will of Mr. Nobel the "peace" prize is awarded by norwegians: a committee made up of a small group of small people^W"politicians".

It would have been an ultimate stunt in the sibling tease/fight between Sweden and Norway ^_^

Anyway this all makes it official; Al Gore is a complete hack. That's all the Nobel "peace" prize is; official certification of approval from the mindless.

And Carter has done more on a weekend for the cause of peace
then Kissinger ever did.

Yep, because every weekend another country fell into the 'peaceful' grasp of world communism under Carter's watch.