President Bush was the invisible man at the GOP convention, barely getting a mention. Something tells me Bush doesn’t mind: unlike Clinton, he’s secure in himself and understands that the coming presidential election counts more than his feelings at this moment.

I admire his humility, his determination and his guts. As does Iraqpundit:

While it’s fashionable to mock President Bush, some in Washington are smart enough to speak the truth. WaPo’s editorial writer says today that Bush’s surge decision, in opposition to the counsel of most of Congress and some in his own administration, will stand as one of the best and most courageous acts of his presidency.

The writer talks about Anbar in Iraq that though there is, as ever, reason for concern about the future of the Sunni province, it is a significant success.

Typically those who were opposed to the surge, including Obama and Biden, say that things are better because the Sunni tribes turned against al-Qaeda before the surge. In other words, they argue U.S. troops didn’t have much to do with the victory in Anbar. But there is information that says otherwise.

WaPo reports that Bob Woodward’s latest book tells us that the Sunni leaders did some of the work but “groundbreaking” new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to locate, target and kill insurgent leaders and key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

While Barack Obama was busy winning his party’s nomination by demanding an end to the Iraq war by quitting, Bush was busy ending the war by winning. Slowly, it sinks in.

Voter confidence in the War on Terror is at the highest level ever recorded since Rasmussen Reports began regular tracking in January 2004. Fifty-four percent (54%) of American voters now think the United States and its allies are winning the war. The previous high-water mark for optimism–52%–was reached a handful of times in September and October 2004.

Optimism about the situation in Iraq is also at an all-time high. Forty-eight percent (48%) now expect the situation in that troubled country to get better over the next six months. Only 17% expect things to get worse. In addition to being the most optimistic assessment ever recorded, these numbers reflect a remarkable turnaround over the past year. Last August, just 27% thought things were going to get better while 47% were pessimistic.

Looking longer term, voters are evenly divided as to whether history will judge the mission in Iraq as a success or failure. Thirty-eight percent (38%) offer an optimistic assessment while 41% say the opposite. Seventy-three percent (73%) of Republicans think history will look kindly on the effort in Iraq while 63% of Democrats disagree. Unaffiliated voters are divided on the question.

These numbers also reflect an amazing turnaround over the past year. In August a year ago, 57% thought history would judge the U.S. mission in Iraq to be a failure. At that time, just 29% thought it would be viewed a success.

Edward Luttwak:

That George W Bush’s foreign policy has been a total failure is now taken for granted by so many people that one usually hears it stated as a simple truth that need not be argued at all.

It has happened before. When President Harry S Truman said in March 1952 that he would not seek re-election, most Americans could agree on one thing: that his foreign policy had been a catastrophic failure. In Korea his indecision had invited aggression, and then his incompetence had cost the lives of some 54,000 Americans and millions of Korean civilians in just two years of fighting—on both counts more than ten times the number of casualties in Iraq.

Right-wingers reviled Truman for having lost China to communism and for his dismissal of the great General Douglas MacArthur, who had wanted to win it back, with nukes if necessary. Liberals despised Truman because he was the failed shopkeeper who had usurped the patrician Franklin Roosevelt’s White House—liberals always were the snobs of US politics.

Abroad, Truman was widely hated too. The communist accusation that he had waged “bacteriological warfare” to kill Korean children and destroy Chinese crops was believed by many, and was fully endorsed by a 669-page report issued by a commission chaired by the eminent British biochemist Joseph Needham. Even more people believed that Truman was guilty of having started the cold war by trying to intimidate our brave Soviet ally, or at least that he and Stalin were equally to blame.

How did this same Harry Truman come to be universally viewed as a great president, especially for his foreign policy? It is all a question of time perspectives: the Korean war is half forgotten, while everyone now knows that Truman’s strategy of containment was successful and finally ended with the almost peaceful disintegration of the Soviet empire.

For Bush to be recognised as a great president in the Truman mould, the Iraq war too must become half forgotten. The swift removal of the murderous Saddam Hussein was followed by years of expensive violence instead of the instant democracy that had been promised. To confuse the imam-ridden Iraqis with Danes or Norwegians under German occupation, ready to return to democracy as soon as they were liberated, was not a forgivable error: before invading a country, a US president is supposed to know if it is in the middle east or Scandinavia.

Yet the costly Iraq war must also be recognised as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the far more costly Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment. For the Bush response to 9/11 was precisely that—a global attack against the ideology of Islamic militancy. While anti-terrorist operations have been successful here and there in a patchy way, and the fate of Afghanistan remains in doubt, the far more important ideological war has ended with a spectacular global victory for President Bush.

Of course, the analogy with Truman is far from perfect: the Soviet Union was a state, not a state of mind. But even so, once Bush’s victory is recognised, the errors of Iraq will be forgiven, just as nobody now blames Truman for having sent mixed signals on whether Korea would be defended. Of course, the Bush victory has not yet been recognised, which is very odd indeed because it has all happened in full view.

Until 9/11, Islamic militants, including violent jihadists of every sort, from al Qaeda to purely local outfits, enjoyed much public support—either overt or tacit—across most of the Muslim world. From Morocco to Indonesia, governments appeased militants at home while encouraging them to focus their violent activities abroad. Some, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) funded both militant preachers and armed jihadists.

The Saudis financed extremist schools in many countries, including the US and Britain, and had thousands of militant preachers on the payroll in addition to writing cheques for jihadists in the Caucasus, Pakistan and a dozen other places (although not to Osama bin Laden himself, their declared enemy). The UAE rulers who now talk only of their airlines and banks are reliably reported to have handed over sackfuls of cash to Osama in person, meeting him at Kandahar’s airfield when flying in to hunt endangered species. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were also the only countries that joined Pakistan in recognising the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. Other Muslim governments, notably Sudan, Syria and Yemen, helped jihadists by giving them passports and safe havens, while others still, including Indonesia, simply turned a blind eye to Islamist indoctrination and jihadist recruitment.

Other than the Algerian and Egyptian governments, every Muslim state preferred at least to coexist with militant preachers and jihadis in some way. Pakistan did much more than that; its Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, funded, armed and trained both the Taliban in Afghanistan and thousands of jihadists dedicated to killing Indian civilians, policemen and soldiers in Kashmir and beyond.

All this came to an abrupt end after 9/11. Sophisticates everywhere ridiculed the uncompromising Bush stance, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” as a cowboy stunt, but it was swiftly successful. Governments across the Muslim world quickly changed their conduct. Some moved energetically to close down local jihadist groups they had long tolerated, to silence extremist preachers and to keep out foreign jihadis they had previously welcomed. Others were initially in denial. The Saudis, in the person of interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, started off by denying that the 9/11 terrorists were Arabs, let alone Saudis, while the UAE princes accused of giving cash to Bin Laden pretended they had never heard of him.

Denial did not last. As they saw American special forces and long-range bombers smashing the Taliban, the Saudis began to admit responsibility for having spread extremism through the thousands of schools and academies they financed at home and abroad. An agonising reappraisal of their own Wahhabi form of Islam continues. The Saudi king has convened an inter-faith conference of Muslims, Christians and Jews—a huge step given the Wahhabi prohibitions of any form of amity with non-Muslims. Inside the kingdom, only less extreme preachers now receive public support. Bin Laden had been the Saudis’ enemy for years, but it was only after 9/11 that they began actively to hunt down his supporters and made their first moves to discourage rich Saudis from sending money to jihadists abroad. More than a thousand Saudis have been arrested, dozens have been killed while resisting arrest, and Saudi banks must now check if wire transfers are being sent to Muslim organisations on the terrorist list.

In different ways, other governments in Muslim countries all the way to Indonesia also took their stand with Bush and the US against the jihadists, even though jihad against the infidel is widely regarded as an Islamic duty. Suddenly, active Islamists and violent jihadists suffered a catastrophic loss of status. Instead of being admired, respected or at least tolerated, they had to hide, flee or give it up. Numbers started to shrink. The number of terrorist incidents outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq keeps going down, while madrassas almost everywhere have preferred toning down their teachings to being shut down. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, the dominant association of imams condemns all forms of violence without exception.

Read on.

Andrew Klavan:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror — films like “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted” — which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3″ and now “The Dark Knight”?

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?

The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of “The Dark Knight” itself: Doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

If you think the left puts global warming concerns ahead of politics, think again.

At least in India, the leftwing is trying to derail a deal to bring nuclear power, which is cheap and generates no greenhouse gases, to India via an agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

US President George W Bush has urged India’s Prime Minister Manmahan Singh to push ahead with a controversial deal on nuclear power between the two countries in the wake of a key confidence vote in New Delhi.

The issue has divided opinion as supporters argue it is the only way to keep pace with the energy demands of India’s fast-growing economy. But many remain deeply suspicious of a deal they fear will cede too much influence to America.

Opposition forced a vote-of-confidence, which the ruling party won handily.

The vote was triggered after the government’s left-wing allies withdrew their support for the nuclear deal struck with the US in 2005. The pact will give India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, access to US nuclear technology and fuel for civilian use. In return, India’s civilian nuclear facilities would be opened to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Those in favour of the deal argue it will help meet India’s escalating energy demands:

“Our economy has been growing at a rate of 8-9% over the last decade,” says Vishal Budda, an engineer from Delhi. “We simply need nuclear energy to keep the momentum running.”

Yet many Indians are suspicious of America’s interest as well as its intentions.

“This deal will just make us a junior partner of the U.S.,” says Vikram Mittal, President of the Haryana Student Federation of India. “America is trying to hijack our foreign and national policies. First it will be the nuclear deal, then it will be agricultural deals, then education- before we know it we will be another puppet of the U.S.”

Paranoia runs deep, eh? And, with all affection for India, and I have plenty, becoming junior partner would be a promotion. This is still the Third World.

India is under pressure from Washington to sign the accord before the U.S. presidential elections in November. Some think this pressure is an indication that America will be the real winners from this agreement.

“This deal will generate over 100 billion dollars worth of business for the U.S,” says Bhadra Kumar, a left-wing diplomat. “And it will also give them more power to maintain there dominance over the Muslim world if India is a close ally. But what do we get? Expensive power when our people are already going hungry.”

Many on the left suspect the deal has nothing to do with India’s energy needs.

Does the following remark not remind you of Pelosi, Schumer et al?

“Nuclear power provides only 3 per cent of India’s current energy and this will not change massively in the near future,” says Mohammed Thallath, student of International Relations. “We have an abundance of natural resources here as well as energy security through the supply of gas from Iran. No, this is all about money - it may generate business for India but more importantly it will generate massive kickbacks for the politicians.”

Because nuclear energy plays a small role today that’s a reason to not develop nuclear power for tomorrow? Whew.

William McGurn: 

David Addington and Omar Khadr are two names that will forever be linked to the war on terror.

Mr. Addington is chief of staff to Vice President Richard Cheney and a former colleague of mine. He’s the son of a West Point man who earned a bronze star in World War II and went on to become a general. Before coming to the White House, David put in stints at the CIA, at a congressional intelligence committee, and at the Pentagon — all giving him an expertise on intelligence and national security issues only a handful of others can match.

Then there’s Mr. Khadr. He is the son of a man who helped found and finance al Qaeda, and who died in a 2003 gun battle with Pakistani troops near the Afghan border.

So close were the family ties that the Khadrs lived for a while in the bin Laden family compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan; and when Mr. Khadr’s sister was married, bin Laden was an honored guest. Mr. Khadr himself went through weapons training at an al Qaeda training camp, and was captured in 2002 after a battle in which he is alleged to have killed a Special Forces medic. Ultimately he was brought to Guantanamo, where he awaits trial before a military commission for war crimes.

Guess who gets the sympathy in the press?

Read on.

Nelson Mandela recently celebrated his 90th birthday. A huge rock concert was held in London’s Hyde Park as a fundraiser for Mandela’s AIDS charity.

But the tragedy of South Africa’s AIDS epidemic could have been averted  by Mandela.

We quote from the 4-hour PBS documentary, The Age of AIDS.

NARRATOR: As in the West, gay activists were among the first to warn that aids was coming.

EDWIN CAMERON, AIDS Law Project: I got infected, as thousands, hundreds of thousands of comparable gay men in Sydney and San Francisco and elsewhere. But it was already plain at that stage that there was a heterosexual African epidemic, which was going to surpass the epidemic amongst people like myself.

ZACKIE ACHMAT: We started an HIV prevention program, trying to speak to people about it, trying to say to people to use condoms, and so on.

NARRATOR: In the black townships, the activists met resistance.

MANDLA MAJOLO: People from outside come into your community, telling you how to behave, especially if they are whites and you’re black, and you can easily look at it as if they think that you are irresponsible sexually. And once you reach that feeling, you start to build walls.

NARRATOR:In pockets across the nation, like rural KwaZulu-Natal, people began to die from AIDS. Increasingly, they were women, infected by their husbands and lovers who’d worked in the mines.

D.E. NDWANDWE, Nurse, KwaZulu-Natal: We used to get more males than females, but eventually, there was a change and we got more female patients than males, you know, such a change that we actually had to change the accommodation at some stage, use the people who worked for females and use the other ward for males.

NARRATOR:For four years after Mandela’s release, the apartheid leaders and the ANC were consumed with the transfer of power. In that political vacuum, an opportunity to stem the epidemic was slipping away.

SALIM ABDOOL KARIM, M.D., University of KwaZulu-Natal: In a way, the complex political transition, the lack of credibility of the apartheid government at that time, which was disintegrating, in effect, and the new government was yet to be installed- and the new government had all kinds of challenges, not least HIV.

NARRATOR: In poor, crowded townships like Soweto, the epidemic accelerated. doctors at the nation’s largest hospital were soon overwhelmed.

GLENDA GRAY, M.D., Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto: It was just hemorrhaging. And we just watched this- this thing explode in our face.

NARRATOR: Babies were being infected by their mothers through childbirth and breast feeding.

Dr. GLENDA GRAY:As HIV became more frequent and more commonplace in children, and as they needed more and more care, the ICUs in the country also made decisions not to admit children with HIV into their ICUs because it was terminal, and we needed to keep the beds open for children who had better prognosis. HIV became the new apartheid in South Africa. You know, we discriminated not on race anymore, but on HIV status.

Nurses were burnt out. Doctors didn’t care, as well, you know? “Why should I care when the government doesn’t care?”

NARRATOR: In May 1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president, he saw his job as reconciliation, holding his fractured nation together. Activists hoped he would also make time for AIDS.

EDWIN CAMERON:At the time I chaired a national convention on AIDS, my co-chair and I made every effort we could to get an audience with President Mandela, and we didn’t succeed. We got an audience instead with Deputy President de Klerk, and Deputy President Mbeki joined the meeting.

NARRATOR:Mandela delegated AIDS to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki

Mbeki, Mandela’s eventual successor and SA’s current leader, became convinced that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and thwarted efforts to deal with the crisis.

In the US, Senator Jesse Helms was blocking efforts to send aid to Africa, primarily on moral grounds. Then he got a visit from singer, Bono. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, was also advocating help for Africa.

Then Bush stepped in, doing what Bill Clinton never did: act.

NARRATOR: Bono’s activism was backed by his own Christian faith. Franklin Graham took notice.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM: Bono has a pretty significant level of biblical understanding. He’s read the Bible. Not once, but I think he’s read it many times.

BONO: I was offended to discover that the religiosity of this country was not available to the AIDS emergency, so I asked to meet as many church leaders as I could and used examples from the Scriptures. You know, “Isn’t this the leprosy of the age,” I argued. “Isn’t this what,” you know, “the Christ spent his time with?” And yet the church now is walking across the road and looking the other way.

NARRATOR: With Franklin Graham’s support, Bono came to Washington to meet Jesse Helms.

BONO: Jesse Helms is a tough guy, but he’s also rigorous, from his point of view. So you know, Christ only speaks of judgment once, and oddly enough, it’s in regard to the poor. I think it’s Matthew 23. It’s the famous lines, “I was naked and you clothed me. I was a prisoner and you visited me.’ And then they say to Christ, “What are you talking about? You weren’t.” “I was sick and you came to me.” And he says, “No, no, I wasn’t. But as much as you do this to the least of these, you do it unto me.” And that’s a very powerful piece of Scripture.

And he was very moved. Even emotionally, he kind of welled up. And as I was leaving the room, he said - big Southern- big, tall, Southern old boy, you know, just this amazing character- he said, “I want to give you a blessing.” And he put his arms around me and then he gave me this blessing. And I take such- I take blessings pretty seriously. And I went out and of course told the assembled press what had happened, and they couldn’t believe it.

I’m very humbled. I’m having my world turned upside down, and I’m surprised that people should be so generous in letting an obvious outsider in.

Sen. JESSE HELMS: You’ll never be an outsider. You’ll always be a friend.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM: He respected what Bono was telling him, and Senator Helms changed his position to where opposing funding for HIV/AIDS, he became an advocate for funding.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: Thank you all. Bono, I appreciate your heart. Let me tell you what an influence you’ve had. Dick Cheney walked in the Oval Office, he said, “Jesse Helms wants us to listen to Bono’s ideas.” That’s pretty-

BONO: And he was very well informed about it. I was surprised that he knew- you know, he knew as much as he did. And to be fair to President Bush, he really responded, and he responded in a way that no one could ever have imagined.

NARRATOR: Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top scientist from the NIH, was summoned to the White House. They wanted a plan on AIDS.

Dr. ANTHONY FAUCI: It was driven by the president. He said he wanted it to be feasible, he wanted it to be bold, and he wanted it to be accountable.

NARRATOR: Bush was also getting advice from Franklin Graham, one of his spiritual advisers.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM: I tried to encourage him to- first of all, in most of Africa, not only do you have a church, but there are church-related hospitals. And we need to enlist these churches in this fight against HIV/AIDS. And we don’t need to be pouring this money into some of these governments, who are going to squander the money.

NARRATOR: A plan emerged. It would draw on both religious and government health services already in place.

Dr. ANTHONY FAUCI: Therapy prevention care for HIV can really work under these circumstances, if you do it the African way. Don’t parachute in your own preconceived notion about how things can be done, do it the way the Africans feel that they can do it.

The White House staff said, “We believe you, Tony, but you’re a white American who works for the federal government. We want to hear, is this thing feasible from people who are in the trenches.”

NARRATOR: Fauci reached out to Uganda’s leading AIDS specialist to convince the White House staff.

PETER MUGYENYI, M.D., Joint Clinical Research Ctr.: They were very skeptical that infrastructure would not support anti-retroviral therapy on the African continent. They even went to some extremes of saying that the continent do not even have clean water.

NARRATOR: In January 2003, the plan was still behind closed doors. With a looming war in Iraq, there were worries about the White House’s priorities.

BONO: I said that to President Bush. You know, I said, “Look, paint them red, white and blue, if you want, but these drugs are the best advertisement you’re going to get right now, and that might be important right now.” And so, you know, above the moral imperatives comes the political imperative to some people. So fine, whatever brings you to the party.

NARRATOR: As the president arrived for his State of the Union speech, everyone expected him to issue an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. They were not prepared for what came first.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims - only 50,000 - are receiving the medicine they need. I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

Dr. PETER MUGYENYI: That sounded like melodious music. From there onwards, things would never be the same. And that was victory for the people who were suffering and who were now going to have hope.

The entire documentary is online in multiple video formats.

Sameh El-Shahat defends president Bush as “the most under-rated president ever.”

Yes, we’ve all heard the Bushisms and laughed at them but do you really think somebody supposedly that thick can make it to the top of the most sophisticated political system the world has ever seen?

No, and that is because Mr Bush is far cleverer than most of his predecessors. He may not have been a Rhodes Scholar, but he has the ability to reach out to his people and read them.

Take the Iraq war for example. OK, so he got us into Iraq in the first place. But for Pete’s sake, he’s the leader of the world’s only superpower. He needs to take decisions, even if sometimes they have nasty consequences - which is far better than we do in Europe, where we enjoy dithering not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Something had to be done about Iraq and our government was all for attacking it too. So let’s not blame G.W. for the war.

And when things did go wrong in Iraq, and there were calls to pull out, Mr Bush just followed his own counsel and doubled his bet with the Surge.

And he was right because Iraq is in a relatively better shape today than it ever was and Al Qa’eda is a shadow of its former self in that country.

This is a man who has the courage of his convictions.

Let’s not forget how Europe does wars.

Usually we wait and wait until the enemy starts attacking, then we let them win a bit, then we fight until we are tired, then we just call the US to come over to clean our mess.

VIDEO HERE.

President Bush is mocked as a weak speaker, but his speech on Sept. 20, 2001, ranks near the top of any speech given in the past 50 years. 

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President Pro Tempore, members of Congress, and fellow Americans: In the normal course of events, presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people.

We have seen it in the courage of passengers who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground. Passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer. And would you please help me welcome his wife Lisa Beamer here tonight?

We have seen the state of our Union in the endurance of rescuers working past exhaustion.

We’ve seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

We have seen the decency of a loving and giving people who have made the grief of strangers their own.

My fellow citizens, for the last nine days, the entire world has seen for itself the state of union, and it is strong. (more…)

Ralph Peters:

THE facts about your security are being torn to shreds by activist liars. And they think that you’re too stupid to know the difference.

Let’s lay out the worst current examples of media make-believe and election-year truth-trashing:

Whopper No. 1: America is less safe today than it was on Sept. 10, 2001. Oh, really? Where’s the evidence? The Clinton years saw New York City attacked and Americans slaughtered by terrorists around the globe. Nothing was done to protect us.

And the true end of the Clinton era came on 9/11.

A record to be proud of.

Countless aspects of the Bush-Cheney administration deserve merciless criticism. But fair is fair: Since 9/11, we haven’t suffered a single successful terrorist attack on our homeland. Not one.

Explain to me, please, how this shows we’re less safe. What factual measurement applies, other than the absence of attacks?

God knows, the terrorists desperately wanted to strike our homeland. And they couldn’t. Are we supposed to believe that was an accident?

Whopper No. 2: Al Qaeda is stronger than ever. Al Qaeda just suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq that may prove decisive. It can’t launch attacks beyond its regional lairs. The cowardly Osama bin Laden can’t show his face (remember his Clinton-era pep rallies?).

Yes, terrorists can still murder innocents on their home court. I personally prefer that to them killing Americans in Manhattan and Washington. Even in Iraq, al Qaeda’s been beaten down to violent-fugitive status.

By what objective measurement is al Qaeda stronger today than it was when it had an entire country for its base and its tentacles reached all the way to Florida and the Midwest?

Whopper No. 3: Success in Iraq is an illusion - the surge failed. Folks, this is something only a New York Times columnist could believe.

Every single significant indicator, from Iraqi government progress through the performance of Iraqi security forces to the plummeting level of violence, has changed for the better - remarkably so.

If current trend-lines continue, it may not be long before Baghdad is safer for Iraqi citizens than the Washington-Baltimore metroplex is for US citizens. Iraq’s government is working, its economy is booming - and its military has driven the concentrations of terrorists and militia from every one of Iraq’s major cities.

And our troops are coming home. Where’s the failure?

IBD:

The U.S. has just persuaded the most isolated tyranny on Earth to disable a plutonium plant and turn over nearly 19,000 pages of nuclear documents. Would Obama do better?

Barack Obama has done a lot of talking in his campaign about the merits of “tough diplomacy,” as he likes to put it, “the kind that the Bush administration has been unable and unwilling to use.”

In that vein, Obama has belittled Asia’s U.S.-led six-party talks between North Korea, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, calling them an “ad hoc arrangement.”

As an alternative, “Obama is willing to meet with the leaders of all nations, friend and foe,” according to the foreign policy section of his campaign Web site. As Obama’s thinking goes, “if America is willing to come to the table, the world will be more willing to rally behind American leadership to deal with challenges like terrorism, and Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs.”

Similarly, Obama’s immediate predecessor as Democratic presidential standard bearer, Sen. John Kerry, this week remarked that “engaging our enemies can pay dividends.”

Kerry was referring to the Bush administration’s modest but significant diplomatic victory in persuading the communist government of North Korea to deliver records of its nuclear activities to China on Thursday. The development is a key move toward Pyongyang’s atomic disarmament.

Much is being made of the Kerry “compliment” by those outraged that the president will now reward North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il by easing some sanctions, and in 45 days remove the regime from America’s list of terrorist client states.

The president’s own former U.N. ambassador, the clear-minded, no-nonsense John Bolton, called it ” shameful” and said it signaled “the final collapse of Bush’s foreign policy.”

And House Intelligence Committee ranking Republican Pete Hoekstra of Michigan said the president’s move rewards a “brutal dictator for shallow gestures.” He suggested that the Bush Administration may have been fooled by Kim, not unlike the way he fooled Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

But the “concessions” granted to Pyongyang are largely symbolic in nature. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stresses that we have provided precious little aid or help in the economic sphere and that considerable sanctions remain in place.

And the president pointed out that “the two actions America is taking will have little impact on North Korea’s financial and diplomatic isolation. North Korea will remain one of the most heavily sanctioned nations in the world.”

As Bush put it, this is “a moment of opportunity for North Korea.”

The whole to-do over FISA was a combination of Bush-bashing politics and Leftist paranoia. After months of sound and fury signifying nothing, the Democrats found enough adults to do what’s right for America.

In a tense moment during negotiations over the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, Sen. Kit Bond — the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee — said that his side of the aisle could never accept one of the proposals the Democrats were pushing.

According to Democratic insiders, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer abruptly stopped the meeting and said that, if a deal was made, no one would get more grief than he would.

Hoyer was right about that.

The Maryland Democrat shepherded a set of FISA amendments through the House last week — winning praise from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and even some in his party to who opposed the deal — but now finds himself subjected to a barrage of criticism from his party’s left.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) called the House bill a “capitulation.” Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald called Hoyer an “evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration.” Firedoglake.com blogger Jane Hamsher — delivering the lowest possible blow from the liberal blogosphere — declared Hoyer “the new Joe Lieberman.”

Ann Coulter: 

In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised.

I generally don’t write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.

Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I’ll consider downgrading Bush from “Great” to “Really Good.”

Merely taking out Saddam Hussein and his winsome sons Uday and Qusay (Hussein family slogan: “We’re the Rape Room People!”) constitutes a greater humanitarian accomplishment than anything Bill Clinton ever did — and I’m including remembering Monica’s name on the sixth sexual encounter.

But unlike liberals, who are so anxious to send American troops to Rwanda or Darfur, Republicans oppose deploying U.S. troops for purely humanitarian purposes. We invaded Iraq to protect America.

It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq. In the past few years, our brave troops have killed more than 20,000 al-Qaida and other Islamic militants in Iraq alone. That’s 20,000 terrorists who will never board a plane headed for JFK — or a landmark building, for that matter.

We are, in fact, fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them at, say, the corner of 72nd and Columbus in Manhattan — the mere mention of which never fails to enrage liberals, which is why you should say it as often as possible.

The Iraq war has been a stunning success. The Iraqi army is “standing up” (as they say), fat Muqtada al-Sadr –the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism — has waddled off in retreat to Iran, and Sadr City and Basra are no longer war zones. Our servicemen must be baffled by the constant nay-saying coming from their own country.

…

Just this week, The New York Times reported that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Southeast Asia have all but disappeared, starved of money and support. The U.S. and Australia have been working closely with the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, sending them counterterrorism equipment and personnel.

But no one notices when 9/11 doesn’t happen. Indeed, if we had somehow stopped the 9/11 attack, we’d all be watching Mohammed Atta being interviewed on MSNBC, explaining his lawsuit against the Bush administration. Maureen Dowd would be writing columns describing Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a “wannabe” terrorist being treated like Genghis Khan by an excitable Bush administration.

We begin to forget what it was like to turn on the TV, see a tornado, a car chase or another Pamela Anderson marriage and think: Good — another day without a terrorist attack.

But liberals have only blind hatred for Bush — and for those brute American interrogators who do not supply extra helpings of béarnaise sauce to the little darlings at Guantanamo with sufficient alacrity.

The sheer repetition of lies about Bush is wearing people down. There is not a liberal in this country worthy of kissing Bush’s rear end, but the weakest members of the herd run from Bush. Compared to the lickspittles denying and attacking him, Bush is a moral giant — if that’s not damning with faint praise. John McCain should be so lucky as to be running for Bush’s third term. Then he might have a chance.

Bush did not lie us into Iraq. Period.

Touring Vietnam in 1965, Michigan Gov. George Romney proclaimed American involvement there “morally right and necessary.” Two years later, however, Romney — then seeking the Republican presidential nomination — not only recanted his support for the war but claimed that he had been hoodwinked.

“When I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get,” Romney told a Detroit TV reporter who asked the candidate how he reconciled his shifting views.

Romney (father of Mitt) had visited Vietnam with nine other governors, all of whom denied that they had been duped by their government. With this one remark, his presidential hopes were dashed.

The memory of this gaffe reverberates in the contemporary rhetoric of many Democrats, who, when attacking the Bush administration’s case for war against Saddam Hussein, employ essentially the same argument. In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate’s 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that “the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress.”

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”

Yet Rockefeller’s highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

In 2003, top Senate Democrats — not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others — sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month’s report, titled “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” includes only statements by the executive branch.

Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors — many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats’ lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers.

So what does this say about Democrats, who have knowingly spread this lie about Bush, simply for political advantage?

What does it say about their seriousness in keeping the nation safe?

Katie Couric:

However you feel about her politics, I feel that Sen. Clinton received some of the most unfair, hostile coverage I’ve ever seen.

Apparently she never noticed the groin-kicking media treatment of George Bush.

Victor Davis Hanson writes about Success Being an Orphan.

Recent studies showing a decline in global incidents of Islamic terror have been interpreted as solely a Middle-East intramural affair. Sometimes the good news is said to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. We are supposed to believe that American policies of counter-terrorism at home have been of little value, if not McCarthyesque. Beefed-up security, the fight against the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the cultural creation of a repugnance — and penalty — for jihadism (as in contrast to the 1990s), have likewise supposedly played no role.

But surely the catalyst for the decline in terrorist incidents worldwide was the radically different response of the U.S. to terrorism and 9/11 that finally brought jihadism into an open-shooting war against the West (e.g., cf. the Left’s “creating terrorists”), in which the terrorists are losing the battle-space, along with the hearts and minds of those in the Middle East — as their own websites and cries of anguish attest.

The successful toppling of Saddam was followed in short order by the shutdown of Dr. Khan’s atomic shop, the surrender of WMDs by the Libyans, and the supposed sidetracking of the Iranian nuclear bomb program (at least according to the National Intelligence Estimate) — and yet no one thought the timing of all these events was odd (even when Ghaddafi himself reportedly connected his decision to abandon a weapons of mass destruction program to Saddam’s fate).

By the same token, the rise of governments that are sympathetic to the U.S. in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe is never associated with a shared and growing worry over Islamic radicalism — or a grudging, often private acknowledgment of the U.S. role abroad in beating back jihadism. How surreal to see a constitutional government in Iraq, with broad popular support, fighting and defeating terrorists and insurgents of both the Wahhabi and Iranian brand — at a time when the consensus is that Iraq only made terrorism much worse. As we’ve seen from recent events, there are many governments abroad that deserve criticism, whether in China, the Sudan, or Burma, but Iraq is not one of them.

So these are upside-down times when facts and events on the ground simply do not support the general pessimism of the Western media, the serial publication of gloomy he-did-it,-not-me memoirs about the post-9/11 supposed failures, and the shrill rhetoric of the Democratic primaries.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted on Monday that Muslims would uproot “satanic powers” and repeated his controversial belief that Israel will soon disappear, the Mehr news agency reported. “I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene,” he said.“Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started.”

George W. Bush:

…the founding charter of Hamas calls for the “elimination” of Israel. And that is why the followers of Hezbollah chant “Death to Israel, Death to America!” That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that “the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties.” And that is why the president of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men  and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

IBD:

Take a look at what happened in the global war on terror just over the Memorial Day weekend:

• Iraqi forces ran al-Qaida terrorists out of Mosul, the terror organization’s final urban stronghold. That victory reduces the killers to fringe areas with little public support, and a truncated capacity to recruit and strike terror in Iraq’s cities. Al-Qaida has “never been closer to defeat than they are now,” said Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Iraqi troops also cleaned out Basra and Sadr City, reducing any prospect for domestic insurgents to take power by force. Along with al-Qaida, these terrorists may try to continue, but the will is fading as the pressure is ratcheted up.

• In Colombia, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos announced that Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, founder of the FARC Marxist terror group, died a hunted man in the jungle on March 26 as bombs rained down on him. Better still, the government knew this because it penetrated FARC. Marulanda died knowing his chosen successor, Raul Reyes, had been blown away, too. Indeed, three of FARC’s seven top leaders have been killed since March, and the rest are headed “for the grave,” Santos said.

Hundreds of FARC foot soldiers are now furtively phoning the government to beg for a deal. Along with fears of their own men turning them in for cash, FARC leaders now work in a poisoned atmosphere, knowing spies are in their midst. They won’t win.

• British forces for the first time drove the Taliban from a southern stronghold in a 96-hour battle this month. It was their first combat operation since new troops arrived in March. The New York Times reported a “palpable” sense of relief among villagers, with the district chief and exiles returning to rebuild. “There has been huge optimism from the people,” an officer was quoted as saying.

• In the south Philippines, Marxist and Muslim terrorists are desperate. A big arsenal belonging to al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf was unearthed in Sulu Saturday, taking 283 sacks of bomb components out of circulation. Meanwhile, Nur Misuari, the top terrorist of the Moro National Liberation Front, on parole in Davao, pleaded with other terrorists to drop arms and sue for peace at a rally Saturday.

• In Egypt’s al-Qaida inner circle, a leading jihad ideologue, using the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl, has now openly questioned terrorism as a tactic, given al-Qaida’s mounting losses. He threatened to renounce violence — a new blow to the jihadists.

Former Defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, author of War and Decision (which the WaPo, New York Times, LA Times etc. will not review) writes in the today’s WSJ how the Bush administration fumbled its message, post Saddam.

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.

President Bush no longer stressed Saddam’s record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president’s credibility that had already been caused by the CIA’s errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power.

This change can be quantified: In the year beginning with his first major speech about Iraq – the Sept. 12, 2002 address to the U.N. General Assembly – Mr. Bush delivered nine major talks about Iraq. There were, on average, approximately 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam’s record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and danger, with only three paragraphs on promoting democracy. In the next year – from September 2003 to September 2004 – Mr. Bush delivered 15 major talks about Iraq. The average number of paragraphs devoted to the record of threats from Saddam was one, and the number devoted to democracy promotion was approximately 11.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics’ argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That’s a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

In the spring of 2004, with the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis imminent, the president was scheduled to give a major speech about Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld received an advance draft and he gave it to me for review. In keeping with the new trend, the drafted speech focused on the prospects for Iraqi democracy.

White House officials understandably preferred to declare affirmative messages about Iraq’s future, rather than rehash the government’s intelligence embarrassments. Even so, I thought it was a strategic error for the president to make no effort to defend the arguments that had motivated him before the war. Mr. Bush’s political opponents were intent on magnifying the administration’s mistakes regarding WMD. On television and radio, in print and on the Internet, day after day they repeated the claim that the undiscovered stockpiles were the sum and substance of why the U.S. went to war against Saddam.

Electoral politics aside, I thought it was important for national security reasons that the president refute his critics’ misstatements. The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president’s speechwriters. I proposed that the speech “should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place.” It would be useful to “make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism” in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime “had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions.”

In light of 9/11, the “danger that Saddam’s regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great” to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven “unsustainable or inadequate.” I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: “A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism.”

Some of the speech’s rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: “The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there,” I noted. But that implication “is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve ‘democracy.’”

No matter, Bush’s speeches repeatedly failed to stress the strategic reasons for ridding Iraq of Saddam.

I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq’s people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way.

The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq’s future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam’s record, the administration’s record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration’s prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.

But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president’s shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president’s words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.

IBD:

It takes little courage — or brains — to join the mob vilifying President Bush. But the Democrats (and Republicans, too) depicting him as villain will one day regret it.

In the eyes of members of both parties, George W. Bush seems to be the cause of everything from the recent GOP special election losses to a flagging economy to today’s bad weather.

Barack Obama plans to reach the White House by claiming the presidency of Sen. John McCain would amount to a third Bush term. McCain, meanwhile, seems to think it a wise campaign strategy to highlight his differences with the president, such as outgreening the greens on global warming.

Rep. Tom Davis, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, reflected the panic engulfing many Republicans in Congress last week when he called President Bush “absolutely radioactive” and warned, “They’ve got to get some separation from the president” if they want to win this November.

How about a dose of reality?

On the economy, there are indications the sun is coming out after a fairly mild economic storm. More data are showing a recession will be avoided, and it looks like a new bull market in stocks began in March after a short and shallow bear.

The report earlier this month of 20,000 jobs lost in April was far better than had been expected, and unemployment remains low at 5%.

There is undeniably a lot of gloom and doom out there, with the Reuters/University of Michigan sentiment index at a 26-year low. But the National Association for Business Economics announced Monday that it expects the current downturn to be mild and brief.

NABE “anticipates a significant pickup in the second half” with real GDP for 2009 projected to be 2.9%. It may not even classify this downturn as a recession at all.

For the resilience of this economy, we can thank the president. He pushed substantial tax cuts on income and investment through Congress, which were followed by four years of growth, generating over 8 million jobs.

The president also can be thanked for appointing Ben Bernanke, chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, to succeed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chief. Bernanke has moved on several fronts to keep the economy afloat — including creatively making more credit available to combat the subprime mortgage crisis.

As for national security, Obama keeps saying the war in Iraq and the rest of the administration’s foreign and defense policy have, as he put it last week in South Dakota, “prevented us from making this country safe.” But the country is safer than anyone expected after 9/11.

There has not been a single terrorist attack on the homeland, and we have instead foiled multiple terrorist plots to kill innocent Americans. America has succeeded in foiling these plots because Bush gave the National Security Agency the authority to monitor any and all communications of suspected terrorists, by telephone, e-mail or other means.

The president also gave authorization for the CIA to employ tough interrogation methods on terrorists in custody, to the extent of transporting those detainees to secret locations abroad.

As we have prevented the terrorists from taking their jihad to the U.S., we have taken the global war on terror to the terrorists’ home soil. We have given Muslims in the Middle East the opportunity for freedom in Iraq, proving that we are willing to spill our blood and expend our own resources to defend our interests as we promote their liberty.

When faced with the entire Washington establishment demanding an end to the war — including his own father’s secretary of state, James Baker — President Bush stuck to his guns, placed a new general in charge and employed a surge strategy that is now winning the war in Iraq in resounding fashion.

This is the supposed albatross Republicans are so intent on distancing themselves from and which Democrats believe to be the key to victory in November. The facts of the last seven years tell a different story.

…so said President Bush in an interview conducted by Politico.com, the first presidential interview done for a web site.

The reader comments on Politico’s blog are revealing. Democrats hate him. They cannot see the dignity he’s brought to the office, his good nature, his determination to do what’s right, regardless of what’s popular.

These are the same folks who once fawned over Bill Clinton, Bush’s polar opposite. Clinton “lead” by opinion poll. Bush is doing what he thinks is right. And if you hate him for it, call him a miserable failure, declare him the worse president ever etc. it doesn’t seem to faze him.

Thank god for a man like him. Some tidbits:

THE PRESIDENT:  The Oval Office is a place where there’s been, obviously, a lot of amazing experiences over a seven-and-a-half year period. My presidency is one where I’ve had to make some very tough decisions. I guess some presidencies are kind of — were real smooth, there were no real big issues. Well, that’s not the way mine is.

Q. Consequential. That’s what you want —

THE PRESIDENT: Consequential — if that’s how it turns out to be, that’s a good word, because I didn’t want to come to Washington, D.C. and just hold the office for the sake of holding it. I wanted to come to Washington, D.C. and help be a transformative President. And I think history, when they look back, will say this is a fellow who knew how to make decisions, and made some tough ones, stood by them, wasn’t driven by the latest opinion poll, but was driven by some core principles from which he would not deviate.

Indeed.

 Q. Mr. President, for the record, is global warming real?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, it is real, sure is. But the solutions — having said that, the solutions have got to be measured and realistic — you can’t have a solution to global warming unless China and India are part of any international pact. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t accept what’s called the Kyoto Protocol, and therefore was labeled as anti-environment. I’m a realistic guy. If the major emitters of greenhouse gases are not a part of a solution, then those who are part of a solution are acting in a way that’s simply not going to — it will affect their own economies, but it won’t affect the overall global warming issue.

So, yes, I put forth a very realistic, straightforward program that makes sense. 

Q. Mr. President, acknowledging those constraints, you’re an oil man — some people say that climate change, global warming could have been your Nixon-to-China. Do you wish you’d done more?

THE PRESIDENT: I did what I think is necessary to actually work, Michael. I mean, I could have signed a — I could have supported a lousy treaty and everybody would have went, “Oh, man, what a wonderful sounding fellow he is.” But it just wouldn’t have worked. I don’t think you want your President trying to be the cool guy and not end up with policies that actually make a difference.

So the policies I’ve outlined are policies that will actually make a difference: nuclear power for generating electricity; battery driven cars; ethanol. There’s a variety of initiatives — clean coal technology — all of which will help us sustain our economic vitality and at the same time be better stewards of the environment. 

Actually, I think his position is pretty cool. Read the whole thing.

Victor Davis Hanson wrote about Bush as pariah, noting the similarity with Harry Truman:

…Bush’s own legacy will be affected by who succeeds him. Ronald Reagan received great press after leaving office in part because a Republican followed him for four years — quite the opposite from the senior George Bush who was thrown out of office in 1992 and blamed for assorted sins the next eight years. Likewise, compare the image of Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton when a president from the opposite party followed each into office.

Second, public perceptions, such as ongoing consumer confidence or support for the war, can dramatically affect policy success or failure. Defending past decisions can sometimes improve their outcomes.

Third, it would elevate the arguments of all three candidates if someone could remind them that energy and food problems, foreign policy crises and economic woes usually involve bad and worse choices.

The American people are more interested in exactly how they are going to improve things, rather than hearing each hour how our collective problems are simply the fault of one man. Searing “Bush did it” into the public conscious won’t resolve our energy, economic or foreign policy challenges.

The truth is that America is providing unprecedented amounts of money to address the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Tax cuts brought in greater, not less total revenue. International trade agreements created more, not fewer, jobs. Security measures at home, and losses suffered by terrorists abroad, in part explain the absence of a second 9/11.

And drilling in ANWR and off the coasts and building more nuclear power plants, refineries, and clean coal plants — if the Congress would only approve — could provide a short-term mitigation of energy prices until we reach a new generation of clean-burning and renewable fuels.

George Bush could learn from “Give ‘em Hell, Harry.” A disliked Truman never went silent into the night, but defended his record until the very end — and was ultimately rewarded for it.

Watch President Bush put these clowns in their place.

Many of these jackals were no doubt whining about how ABC treated Obama in the last debate.

National Review:

As President Bush returns from Eastern Europe, he can reflect on the trip as one of the most successful of his presidency. He didn’t achieve everything on his agenda: NATO won’t offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine anytime soon. On the other hand, the president did secure some 2,000 additional troops for operations in Afghanistan. France has pledged 700 soldiers; another 500 will come from Georgia, 400 from Poland, and smaller numbers from other nations.

Bush’s most important achievement, however, may involve missile defense. Last Thursday, NATO endorsed U.S. plans to build a small missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. NATO’s leaders finally recognize that Iran poses a genuine ballistic-missile threat to Europe and North America and that missile defense is a viable countermeasure. Although the alliance hasn’t done nearly enough to prevent the ayatollahs from going nuclear, NATO’s embrace of Bush’s missile-defense policy represents clear-headed thinking about an emerging threat and an appropriate response. This is progress.

Nobody expected Bush to accomplish much when he met with outgoing Russian president Vladimir Putin over the weekend, and indeed he didn’t. The Kremlin remains opposed to the missile-defense plan. Yet Putin’s rhetoric was far more restrained than it has been on previous occasions. This may be the result of successful advance diplomacy: In March, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Pentagon chief Robert Gates visited Moscow in an effort to abate Russian opposition. Their proposals weren’t made public, but they almost certainly included an offer to let Russia dispatch monitors to the missile-defense sites.

Russian leaders could be coming to the realization that their intimidation campaign against missile defense has failed, at least for the time being (they might think they will have better luck with a Democrat in the White House). The Bush administration never blinked in its commitment to the Czech and Polish sites. Political opposition in the host countries didn’t gain traction. Now NATO has offered its seal of approval. Congressional Democrats remain an obstacle and have attempted to slash funding for the project. John McCain would be wise to advocate missile defense often between now and November — it’s a happy union of smart policy and good politics.

 In western Kenya, a Kellogg MBA is using ‘microequity’ to improve the lives of local farmers.

Andrew Youn was not happy about the passion fruit. The electric green ovules hung on the vine, each the size of a child’s fist. Not yet ripe, the fruits showed bumps and brown spots, suggesting they hadn’t been properly watered. They grew on vertical vines hanging off a larger stem strung about six feet above the ground. Some of the untrimmed leaves scraped the dirt, forming a staircase for soil-borne diseases. In a greenhouse a few kilometers away, 50,000 small plants awaited grafting and planting.

Youn visited several vineyards on a magnificent day in January, and the problems were always the same. He was good-natured but firm as he explained to farmers, through a translator, the need to trim the vines. One farmer, a woman in a headscarf standing on the red-brown soil, seemed to agree. Youn, a Yale University graduate from Minnesota, wasn’t intimidating. At 29, he’s skinny and wears T-shirts and sandals with socks. But in this corner of western Kenya people listen to him. He’s the guy who’s making them money.

A former consultant, Youn is the founder and head of One Acre Fund, a two-year-old nonprofit which aims to link the poorest farmers—those with one acre of land or less—to commercial markets. The concept of microfinance gained international attention in 2006 when its chief pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, won a Nobel Prize. It is practiced by a diverse group of organizations, ranging from huge banks to small NGOs such as One Acre. Each has its own approach but believes, at bottom, that providing capital to the world’s poorest people will create millions of new entrepreneurs.

The LA Times report.

Investors Business Daily:

George W. Bush has been singled out as the American president who has done the most for Africa. So where’s the recognition, both in the media and the black community, of this worthy achievement?

Bill Clinton might have been America’s first black president, but it seems he didn’t do as much for Africa as Bush has. Bob Geldof, Irish rocker and Africa activist, says the Texas oilman, who is wrapping up his second trip to the continent, “has done more than any other president so far.”

That’s high praise from Geldof, a man who has spent much of the last 20 years fixated on Africa’s many problems. He sees Bush’s efforts to fight disease and poverty in Africa as “the triumph of American policy.” Though he says it was “unexpected of the man,” Geldof admits both the president and the nation “rose to the occasion.”

Geldof rightly chastises the American media for ignoring Bush’s contributions to Africa.

But it would be unrealistic to have expected otherwise. This is a national press corps that seems to notice homelessness and poverty only when a Republican is in the White House, and which itself votes heavily Democratic.

Meanwhile, African-Americans give little support to Bush — he got 11% of their vote in 2004 after taking 8% in 2000. Black leaders — such as NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, who has called Bush a liar, compared his judicial nominees to the Taliban and equated the GOP to Nazis — continue their shrill verbal assaults on the man.

Yet under Bush, the U.S. has boosted development and humanitarian aid to Africa from $1.4 billion in his first year in office to $4 billion a year today. He’s also sought $30 billion to fight AIDS.

Trade — far more efficient than aid — between our country and Africa has more than doubled during his terms. This administration has also actively sought to stop the genocide in Darfur and has led in attempts to end wars in Sierra Leone, Sudan and Congo.

As the U.S. press swoons over Barack Obama and his bromidic promise of “change” to the exclusion of almost all else, the African media have noticed Bush’s work.

It wasn’t the New York Times or ABC, but AllAfrica.com that gratefully acknowledged that Bush’s policies “have saved millions of (African) lives and lifted many others from abject poverty.”

Bill Clinton felt Africa’s pain. Bush actually did something about it, and they know the difference.

Gateway Pundit:

President Bush, the “Democracy President”, is on a 5 nation tour of Africa this week. The President and Mrs. Laura Bush will tour Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia.

They will review firsthand the significant progress since the President’s last visit in 2003 in efforts to accelerate economic development and fight global HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other treatable diseases, as a result of the United States’ robust programs.

The Anchoress has had a lot to say of late about the current Republican campaign. Basically her advice is for everyone to calm down. Can’t argue with that.

John McCain was never on my list of top three Republican candidates, but if he’s the GOP nominee, he’ll be better than either Obama or Hillary.

You can’t always get what you want.

The Anchoress also posted a look back at the Bush presidency, with this clip — one of those little moments that are soon forgotten.

The LA Times:

Relaxed, confident and unapologetic, President Bush delivered his seventh and likely final State of the Union address Monday, giving a triumphal appraisal of the war in Iraq and citing a list of modest proposals that came with two barbed veto threats.

Say what? What’s Bush to apologize for? Being gracious for seven years while foaming-at-the-mouth ankle biters howled demented insults?

Maybe Bush should have said:

• I’m sorry for liberating 26 million Afghans from tyranny, especially the women who now have to work at jobs and are denied the right to serve as halftime entertainment at soccer games.
• I’m sorry for asking the public schools to actually demonstrate their students are learning.
• I’m sorry for helping seniors pay for their medicine via Medicare.
• I’m sorry for negotiating an end to the Sudanese civil war that killed 2.5 million people. I’m really sorry the world, meaning Europe, won’t get off its ass and help finish the job in Darfur and be of more use in Afghanistan.
• I’m sorry for trying to reform Social Security. I should have known that Democrats are too selfish to do the right thing.
• I’m sorry I scared Libya into giving up its nuclear weapons.
• I’m sorry I came through with funding for AIDS programs in Africa instead of just talking about it and feeling their pain. Now they’re going to have to figure out how to feed all those survivors.
• I’m sorry that Saddam’s execution was a bit ugly, but hey, evil begets evil.
• I’m really sorry the budding democracy in Iraq scares the crap out of tyrants in Iran and Syria.

Fred Barnes writes a comprehensive account of President Bush’s decision-making process for the surge. To Bush haters, he’ll always be a bumbling moron or a puppet.

History will prove otherwise. As for John McCain’s contention that he pushed hard for the change in tactics in Iraq, he is right.

The date: December 13, 2006. The location: a windowless conference room in the Pentagon known as the Tank. It was an inauspicious place for President Bush to confront the last major obstacle to the most important decision of his second term, perhaps of his entire presidency. And the president chose not to deal with his hosts, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a commander in chief would address subordinates. He hadn’t come to the military brass’s turf simply to order the five chiefs and two combatant commanders to begin a “surge” of additional troops in Iraq and to pursue a radical change in strategy. For that, he might have summoned them to the Oval Office or the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. He had come to the Pentagon to persuade and cajole, not command.

The president was in a weak and lonely position. After Republicans lost the Senate and House in the midterm election on November 7, nearly 200 members of Congress had met with him at the White House, mostly to grouse about Iraq. Democrats urged him to begin withdrawing troops, in effect accepting defeat. Many of the Republicans were panicky and blamed Bush and the Iraq war for the Democratic landslide. They feared the 2008 election would bring worse losses. They wanted out of Iraq too.

I found this interesting. In June 2006:

To stimulate fresh consideration of Iraq strategy, the NSC staff organized a panel of experts to address the president and his war cabinet at Camp David in mid-June. The two-day meeting at the presidential retreat loomed as a potential turning point in the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq.

The four-man panel wasn’t stacked. Kagan spoke in favor of additional troops and outlined his plan for pacifying Baghdad with a “clear, hold, and build” strategy. American soldiers, along with Iraqi troops, would do the holding, living in Baghdad and guarding its citizens, Sunni and Shia alike. Robert Kaplan, the foreign correspondent and military writer now teaching at the Naval Academy, talked about successful counterinsurgency campaigns in the past. (Kaplan’s books are among Bush’s favorites.) Kaplan neither advocated a troop buildup nor opposed it.

When reading Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, I kept thinking that Bush needed to read that book, especially the chapter on how General Pershing fought a counter-insurgency campaing in the Phillipines at the turn of the 20th century.

Indeed, Bush had read it and was smart enough to pick the brain of a journalist for The Atlantic.