Reader Mike sends along a great excerpt from a Wesley Pruden article on the Nobel Peace Prize:

The Nobel Peace Prize was once thought to be the ultimate reward for selfless idealism, and if you’re still in high school, maybe it is today. A decade ago four high-school girls in Kansas heard the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish babies from the Nazis. They wrote a play about her and sent letters to world figures, and this led to her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Miss Sendler, who died last year at age 98, smuggled the babies out of the Warsaw Ghetto in an ambulance over several months early in the war, hiding them in crates, burlap sacks and several times in coffins. She kept a barking dog to drown the cries of the frightened babies. The Nazis arrested her and tortured her severely, breaking her legs in a vise. She bribed a guard to escape a firing squad, and after the war retrieved the names of the babies from jars she buried in her garden, and reunited hundreds of them with relatives.

The Nobel jury was not impressed. They gave the prize that year to Al Gore for his slide show about global warming.