Kevin D. Korenthal, March 23, 2005

I’ve hesitated to lay claim to America and other peace-loving nations have the upper hand in the War on Terror. I have held off on such proclamations because it has always seemed inappropriate to claim success while boots are still on the ground and men and women are dying. But I have watched, over the course of the last 3 years as the mainstream media and international rags have waxed doom and gloom about an Iraq about to break into Civil War and an Administration sure to repeat the fate of the last Republican Administration, one term.

But damn if all the predictions of death, destruction and single term presidencies turned out to be, as I predicted, dead wrong. So here we are at the beginning of the 2nd term with Democratic Reform blooming in the Middle East and a domestic economy, although expensive, healthy and growing healthier. Inflation is after all, demand exceeding supply.

I have taken great joy over the last few weeks reading day after day and liberal rag after liberal rag grudgingly admit that perhaps "Bush was right." Some of the usual suspects of liberalism are still clinging on to the hope that failure will come to what appears now to be total success for The Bush Doctrine.

The 2-year anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom promised "large-scale" protests to be planned all over the world. I think the biggest was in London and ended up being in the low thousands of participants. As Ralph Peters of the New York Post, who was there, so deftly points out, "there were more than 10 times as many strikers protesting a possible lengthening of the 35-hour work week than there were anti-war protesters."

Of course you’re still unlikely to get more than an admission that Saddam was a "bad dude, but that doesn’t mean you overthrow him" when inquiring as to whether or not it was worth all the trouble. And it is still unthinkable to imagine that The New York Times or any other liberal rag will cut The Bush Administration any of the slack they always cut Bill Clinton. But we are entering different days and everyone can feel it.

Lebanon is about to be 100% free of the pesky Syrians that have been the real power in the country for 24 years. We will see 2 more sets of elections in Iraq this year and the de-facto Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has called for more Democratic elections to take place in the next cycle. We will soon see if the Palestinians are capable of self rule of a nation of their own. Of course that might not be Bush’s doing but could you imagine a better set of circumstances under witch one would like to try such an experiment?

Yes, in light of the current administration’s achievements Bill Clinton’s legacy looks even more bleak than it did on the day he left office (and pardoned a dozen criminals). The Progressives that had the upper hand in implementation of their politically correct, speech code agenda are singing a sad, sad song these days. And it has been since the fall of the World Trade Center by the hands of extremists whose ideology was "tolerated" by liberals that this 180 degree turn has occurred.

Copyright © 2005 Kevin D. Korenthal