(NOTE: EU Parliamentarian Daniel Hannan will speak next Monday, October 15 at a Washington Policy Center dinner at the Bellevue Hyatt Regency in Bellevue, WA.)

The choice of the European Community to receive the Nobel Peace prize is attracting praise and condemnation, depending on the quarter.

Reports the AP, "'First Al Gore, then Obama, now this. Parody is redundant,' tweeted Daniel Hannan, a euroskeptic European lawmaker - yes, such things exist - from Britain's Conservative Party. President Barack Obama won the peace prize in 2009, less than a year after he was elected, while Gore, a former U.S. vice president, was the 2007 recipient for his campaign to fight climate change."

The reality is that the Nobel Peace prize, largely unlike other Nobel prizes for science and arts (which are chosen in Sweden), is awarded every year by the Norwegian Parliament. That is how it is set up. And these days the Parliament is left wing. The parliamentarians undoubtedly are seized with their own importance.

Thus we have the power of a supposedly objective body that, in reality, is not objective at all.

Imagine how little interest a prize from the "Parliament of Norway" would attract. But that effectively is what the Peace Prize is. Until abut seven years ago, with different leadership, you got more reasonable decisions. The proper way to report this would be to tell people who the selection committee represents as part of the main story.