Humbled

This is the kind of lede that would make any good journalist want to shoot themselves in the head: "Chief nuclear inspector Mohamed El Baradei has said he felt "humbled" after being named winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize."

Ack. I have a rule that I don't, except under duress, write any quote that is both stupid and false, unless of course it serves a function in the story to show the speaker is stupid and false. "I'm just thinking of the children" rarely cuts muster.

NPR played Mo-Al's press conference, talking about how he danced around his living room after seeing his name announced on television. You see, because it was late, and he hadn't been called to learn he had won, he had inferred he had not won, because he knew the practice was to inform the winner ahead of time. These are not the thoughts and acts of a man humbled; these are the thoughts of a man delighted and proud.

What Mo-Al should be humbled by is letting his role diffuse from mere fact finder into partisan outcome promoter (although Blix was worse, I thought), for participating in the sham to begin with, for holding himself out as able to do something he wasn't able to do, and for interfering in true solutions to the problems he was supposed to be handling.

Oh, and the reason he didn't receive the traditional call advising him of the win? As Mo-Al said during his press conference, it was because he and his agency were known to be so untrustworthy and incompetent that the Nobel committee knew the information would leak to the press. (The competence and trustworthy parts, of course, are merely necessary implications.)