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Few things beat being in the right place at the right time. As they say in those credit card commercials: It's priceless.

For example: Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. His share? About 5 million Swedish Krona, or around $600,000. Learning that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize while I was vacationing at Disneyland? Priceless.

See? The right place at the right time. I mean, can you imagine a better place to hear that news than standing smack in the middle of something called "The Happiest Place on Earth"?

Immediately I hunted down what I assumed were members of this august prize's selection committee. I found Goofy lumbering toward Fantasyland.

"Goofy," I said, "how on earth did you come to that decision?"

"Garsh," he began, "it was a no-brainer."

Perfectly summed up, yes?

All kidding aside, I was in Disneyland with the family last week, and Gore did win the Nobel Peace Prize. Both statements are true, but one is certainly more believable than the other. After all, millions of people go to Disneyland the year around, right?

With the certitude some members of my generation bring to sullying all things good, the once-gleaming Nobel Peace Prize has become, at their hands, little more than a soap box for what conservative writer James Lewis calls "neocommunism" - a generic, as it were, of the original. My generation still is chock full of secular elitists, as dedicated as their predecessors to ridding the world of capitalism and democracy and leaving themselves in charge.

In the last 15 years or so, the prize has gone to the likes of Rigoberta Menchu, whose mythical life, captured in the autobiography "I, Rigoberta Menchu," was actually penned by French Marxist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.

By ordering his terrorist organization to suspend killing innocent people in Israel, Beirut and other Mediterranean locales, Yasser Arafat won the award in 1994.

Soviet Premier Mikhail Gobachev's decision to replace one-ply toilet paper with squeezable Charmin in public facilities no doubt earned him the prestigious Peace Prize in 1990. I jest, yes?

In 2001, the prize went to Kofi Annan and the UN for their peaceful response to African genocide throughout the 1990s, while UN officials made money on the Iraq oil-for-food program.

A year later, Jimmy Carter was chosen most peaceful for repeatedly kissing Fidel Castro on the cheeks.

And now there's Gore. As an Academy Award-winning prophet of doom for global warming, he's proven as tolerant of others' views today as he was statesmanlike in Florida in 2000. And his more-than-comfortable lifestyle, let's call it, seems contrary to his message, no matter how many trees he plants.

For every brilliant Mother Teresa or Doctors Without Borders selection, there have been a dozen Menchu-Annan-Gore-type picks designed more to rub Western noses in the dirt than to recognize service to humankind.

Perhaps the Nobel committee members should set the politics aside and truly give peace a chance.