The accomplishments of President George W. Bush, I believe, will endow him with one of the most sterling legacies of all American presidents – right up there with those of other great wartime presidents, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Harry Truman.

After the September 11^th attacks on our country, the president responded with both righteous indignation and military action – and also the appreciation that all administrations for the past over-60 years failed miserably in bringing peace to the Middle East. The president envisioned a breathtakingly original idea: introducing democracy to the largely feudal regimes of that region.

He rejected the terminal pacifism of his immediate predecessor – and that predecessor’s waffling pro-war/anti-war wife – and first went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then, logically, Iraq, whose mass-murdering dictator had flouted dozens of U.N. resolutions, annihilated thousands of his citizens with poisoned gas, rewarded the families of Palestinian homicide bombers with hefty cash rewards, and was, according to virtually every intelligence agency on earth, accumulating weapons of mass destruction.

The president’s vision struck all the right chords and was embraced by democracy-loving countries throughout the world, voted upon by the usually terrorist-supporting United Nations, and endorsed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and a vast majority of the Congress.

What has happened since then has been quite predictable. Conservatives and most Republicans are still with the president, but the liberals – who only went along to avoid being labeled the weaklings and traitors that come with their DNA – quickly reverted to their base’s basest politically-correct and multiculturalism-is-good philosophy, i.e., that “making nice” is a preferred wartime “strategy,” war is bad, all “cultures” are equal, and terrorists are really “victims” of U.S. “imperial” oppression.

And that is not to omit their irrational hatred of President Bush, who dealt a deadly – indeed unrecoverable – blow to their fragile narcissism by winning two presidential elections, and to the irrational conceit that they were and are both morally and intellectually superior not only to the president but to everyone on earth who doesn’t agree with them.

Now that the 2008 presidential campaign is prematurely upon us, and the Democrats are in control of the Congress, the liberals have once again proven that, more than anything, they want America to lose – lose the war in Iraq, lose the momentum to help others share in the great promise of democracy, and lose the reputation of our heroic military as the finest on the face of the earth. That is not to omit the ignominious actions of a few weak-kneed Republicans, who because they are up for reelection, have “doubts” about the war in Iraq and have chosen to imitate Bill Clinton and his wife’s finger-in-the-wind, poll-driven style of decision-making.

It’s not as if the liberals haven’t offered alternative suggestions to our current policy in Iraq. First they said we should dismantle Guantánamo, end the Patriot Act, and stop our government from listening in on terrorist phone calls. And both before and after the recent report to Congress of General David Petraeus – which affirmed that his “surge” is working, Iraq is being pacified, and the future for that country promises our own country victory – they’ve suggested that the United States should:

▪ Cut
▪ Run
▪ Appease
▪ Capitulate
▪ Apologize
▪ Give up
▪ Declare failure

In fairness, they have no choice. Without coming out and admitting it, they have tacitly acknowledged that there is not a wartime leader among them. The liberals now running for president have dodged this admission by stating, as John Edwards did, that the War in Iraq is not a war at all but rather a “bumper sticker”; as Barack Obama did by suggesting what Investor’s Business Daily calls a “surrender” strategy; and as Hillary Clinton did, ala John Kerry, by saying that she was for the war before she was against it.

Commenting on the “the Democrats' moral bankruptcy” vis-à-vis their cynical and shameful reaction to General David Petraeus’s recent report to Congress, IBD cited “overwhelming margins” in polls conducted by both IBD/TIPP and CBS/New York Times that “have found that the public overwhelmingly wants the commanders in the field – not the politicians in Washington – to call the shots” about the war.

“It's hard to see how Bush can be denied a lion's share of the credit for Iraq's success when, as recently as last December, all bets were that official Washington would shove the diplomatic approach endorsed by the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group down the president's throat,” IBD said. “The White House bet against that conventional wisdom, and now it's clear who won. Democrats, on the other hand, bet the farm on America losing the Iraq war. Now their moral chips are gone.”

A graduate of both Yale University and the Harvard business school, President Bush came to appreciate during his eight-year tenure as governor of Texas that Americans – and the millions of people who flock to our shores each year, both legally and illegally – not only flourish under our capitalist system but also like the idea of “keeping their own money.” To that end, he proposed the largest tax cuts in American history, which, since 2003, has resulted in the creation of 8.3 million new jobs, American exports that rose 27 percent between 2004 and 2006, and an economy that has grown 13 percent.

In spite of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, rising gas prices, Iran’s aggressive nuclear program, the subprime real-estate mortgage problem, recent “corrections” in the stock market, and the relentless doomsday predictions of leftist “experts” like Paul Krugman of the NY Times and countless others, our economy went through the roof and is still the envy of every country on earth!

As Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent for The Washington Times, has documented, “Stocks are booming, interest rates, inflation and unemployment are low, and companies are making money.” But Lambro disagrees with the Office of Management and Budget’s prediction that the annual deficit, estimated at $400 billion just a few years ago, will be $205 billion by the end of this fiscal year.

“The OMB is much too conservative,” he says. “If the economy continues to perform well...we will likely reach a surplus well before 2012.”

Economist and TV personality Lawrence Kudlow calls the astounding Bush economy “the greatest story never told.” In fact, when the Dow Jones exploded by exceeding 14,000, only The Wall St. Journal carried this good news on its front page.

In stark contrast to President Bush’s vision for an “ownership” society, Democrats have offered the following suggestions:

▪ Raise taxes

▪ Institute socialized medicine, which has failed in virtually every country that has tried it and would bankrupt our county

▪ Punish the wealthy CEOs who fuel our economy, boost employment, and give disproportionate charitable contributions to the world’s welfare

▪ Enact an “open borders” policy for illegal immigrants, which will also bankrupt our country

▪ Do away with the Electoral College so that presidents in the future will be elected by only urban populations in NY, NJ, LA, etc. – an electorate that would insure government control and de facto socialism for decades to come

President Bush looked at decades of academic failure of the poor and disenfranchised children in our country and accurately, I believe, concluded this resulted from a complete absence of accountability. So he instituted No Child Left Behind, which has made teachers, parents, and children themselves accountable for math and English literacy, and therefore for the ability of the current school-age generation to compete in our ever-competitive world.

In stark contrast to President Bush’s vision for a truly educated populace, Democrats have offered the following suggestions:

▪ Do away with accountability

▪ Support the dinosaur unions that hate this concept

▪ Complain that the pampered children of today are being “pressured”

▪ Count on the leftwing media not to inform you that private schools, charter schools, parochial schools, and home-schooling – all of which demand accountability – consistently generate significantly better test results and more educated children than do public schools

President Bush looked at the same numbers as the liberals did and concluded that our Social Security system – which allows seniors to retire and receive enough money to live on, or at least get by on – is going broke in the not-too-distant future. Visionary that he is, he offered a sweeping SS reform that would insure that the system would not implode and leave multimillions of tax-paying people who have contributed to the system without the safety nets they deserve.

In stark contrast to his vision, Democrats – and their leftist AARP echo chamber – have offered the following suggestion:

▪ Keep this devolving system exactly as it is

President Bush enacted a Medicare Drug reform bill in which 39 million seniors now get “bargains” for their medications and also bypass many of the bureaucratic boondoggles that have proven so daunting and disastrous in the past.

In predictable opposition to the president’s vision for this sweeping reform, Democrat liberals have offered the following:

▪ Don’t change the horrific status quo!

Today, thanks to the wisdom and prescience of President Bush, the United States has two extraordinary justices on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts, and Samuel Alito. Liberals fought these nominations ferociously, just as they’ve fought the president’s nominations of other stellar jurists to the appellate courts of our nation. To the liberal mind, those who interpret the Constitution as it was written are not acceptable. They prefer justices who reinterpret and invent out of whole cloth statutes that fit their socialist agenda.

A day after the horrific Hurricane Katrina hit several southern states President Bush visited the areas and promptly enacted the most far-reaching financial and support-system help in the history of our country, but not soon enough or good enough for his rabid liberal antagonists.

While the heroic people of Mississippi, led by their Republican Governor Haley Barbour, fought back and recovered with nary the “victim” whine that is the Democrats’ mantra, the powers-that-be in Louisiana and their liberal whiners-in-chief in the Congress purposefully ignored the president’s multiple visits and great largesse to the region and kept up their drumbeat of criticism in order to avoid the cold hard truths of this cataclysmic event.

And what were those truths? That Ray Nagin, the Democrat Mayor of New Orleans; Mary Landrieu, the Democrat senator from New Orleans; and Kathleen Blanco, the Democrat Governor of Louisiana, were all to blame – and still are, as were their predecessors – for literally decades of neglecting Louisiana’s deteriorating and crumbling levies, as well as for their mind-boggling ineffectualness in dealing with the disaster as it unfolded and has continued to unfold.

Lawrence Kudlow has documented the Democrats’ failures in hard terms. He says that according to a government report entitled “The Federal Government Is Fulfilling Its Commitment to Help the People of the Gulf Coast Rebuild,” the U.S. has spent “a monstrous $127 billion, including tax relief to Louisiana – which has amounted to $425,000 per person.”

Now what would the average person do with $425,000? For one thing, they would thank God for this largesse and also use it to build not a semblance of their former homes but virtual castles. But that is not what happened, thanks to the graft-addicted thieves of the New Orleans political hierarchy.

“Where did the rest of that money go?” Kudlow asks – a question the so-called mainstream media avoids like the plague, just as they avoid asking why New Orleans, since Katrina, has become “the murder capital of the world…with a murder rate that is 40 percent higher than before Katrina, and twice as high as other dangerous cities like Detroit, Newark, and Washington, D.C.”

Kudlow reminds us that Hillary Clinton and her socialist ilk think that giving money to wastrels like this is a "government investment – “and that's just what's in store for America if she wins the White House next year.”

Even the higher-ups in New Orleans admitted that they “lost” a billion dollars, which leads even the most un-cynical person to wonder into which Democrat pockets those greenbacks found their way!

While Republicans and conservatives were devastated by the midterm elections in which Democrats gained control of the Congress, nothing, in my opinion, could have been better!

Now that the Democrats have had nine months to “lead” our country, they have demonstrated for the entire country – and the entire world – that they have a spectacular lack of ideas, initiatives, and legislation.

In their first hundred days in power, all they did was launch over 300 investigations, troll for more than that number of documents, and had over 600 oversight hearings. And nearly half of the 39 bills they signed into law were to name a federal property or to build a road! Hence their-lower-than-basement polling, with a mere 14 percent of Americans approving their performance – the lowest rating in the entire history of the Gallup polls.

As Kimberley A, Strassel writes in the Wall St. Journal, when the new majority’s “first 100 hours [were] done and gone, by mid-January, the Democratic Party proceeded to fall apart…”

This is because hate is initially energizing but ultimately impotent. Liberals – after the mental depression they experienced when President Bush won both the 2000 and 2004 elections – were so enraged that all they could do was act like the children they are by calling names, insulting, lashing out at, vilifying, lying about, attempting to obstruct, and manufacturing all manner of phony issues to undermine the president.

But now that they’re in power, they are still stuck on Bush and have proven themselves endemically incapable of leading our country. And that includes the Hollywood crowd that has worked overtime and poured literally billions of dollars to turn out anti-American and anti-Bush movies and documentaries that have earned them “awards” from their left-leaning cronies but close-to-zilch at the box office.

During all of the president’s successes, the Democrats – all of them essentially anti-establishment holdovers from the leftist anti-war days of the 1960s – have relentlessly supported the opinions of those who paved the path for the September 11^th attack: former President Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, current Senator Hillary Clinton, and dozens of other members of the so-called “loyal” opposition, and that is not to omit the current crop of leftists who are still singing the same song – as always out of tune – about our nation’s greatness.

Yes, conservatives are also angry at President Bush for, among other things, suggesting the ill-qualified Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, supporting illegal immigration, engaging in “out of control” federal spending, and also for insisting – against all empirical evidence – that Islam is “the religion of peace.”

They are also especially irate that the president failed to go on the offensive about the minute-by-minute, hourly, daily, monthly, non-stop distortions and lies that emanate from the liberal media, and that his public-relations team – if it existed at all – was so incredibly ineffective. Just as they are angry that he capitulated to the bogus fetish of man-made global warming.

And that is not to omit his failure to direct his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, to aggressively prosecute:

▪ The New York Times and other leftwing newspapers for their treasonous leaks about our national security secrets

▪ Patrick Fitzgerald for prosecutorial misconduct in his obsessive pursuit of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in the Plamegate fiasco, which ultimately revealed that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent, her leftwing husband Joe Wilson was a fraud, and that Libby had committed no crime!

▪ U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton for his malicious prosecution of Border Guards Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos for doing their jobs in guarding America so admirably when they fired at a Mexican drug smuggler

It is not only that George W. Bush, unlike all of those who preceded him over the past nearly-60 years – except for Ronald Reagan – have lacked the vision of our current Commander-in-Chief, it is also that he has distinguished himself by his moral clarity, his advocacy for traditional values and the value of life, his inveterate and consistent decency, his humility, his unflagging optimism about the greatness of our country’s future, and his unfailing respect toward even those who sputter with impotent rage in his presence and hurl invective toward him behind his back and to the media.

As William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, has noted, ”the unnecessary mistakes and the self-inflicted wounds that have characterized the Bush administration should not stop people from looking at the broad forest rather than the often unlovely trees.”

Kristol reminds his readers that we have not had a “second terrorist attack on U.S. soil – not something we could have taken for granted. Second, a strong economy – also something that wasn't inevitable. And third, and most important, a war in Iraq that has been very difficult, but where – despite some confusion…we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome.”

In a riveting article in The New York Sun, entitled “The Long View,” the president’s recently retired counselor, Karl Rove, who acknowledged that he could “hardly be considered an objective observer,” explained that: “History’s concern is with final outcomes, not the missteps or advances of the moment. History will render a favorable verdict if the outcome in the Middle East is similar to what America saw after World War II.”

Rove reminded his readers that: “The Washington Post scorned President Truman as a `spoilsman’ who `underestimated the people’s intelligence.’ New York Times columnist James Reston wrote off President Eisenhower as `a tired man in a period of turbulence.’ At the end of President Reagan’s second term, the New York Times dismissed him as `simplistic’ and a `lazy and inattentive man.’”

These “harsh judgments,” Rove said, “have not weathered well over time. Fortunately, while contemporary observers have a habit of getting presidents wrong, history tends to be more accurate.”

“I have come to understand,” Rove continued, [that] “true leadership leans into the wind. It tackles big challenges with uncertain outcomes rather than taking on simple, sure tasks. It does what is right, regardless of what the latest poll or focus group says.”

Indeed. And there is one more thing by which history will judge President Bush and for which future generations will thank him – his magnificent obsession with America’s safety and security.