The Good President [continued] -- Bush on the Rise

Newsmax surveys recent polls on Presidential approval and notes:

Since March 2009, Bush's Gallup rating has climbed 10 points. Obama's favorability during the same period: down by over 20 points.

The bottom line: just 18 months after leaving office, Bush doesn't look so bad after all – despite the fact that the current administration has used him as a political piñata for months. 

The article attributes this to several factors:

The winding down of the Iraq war, which increasingly seems like a victory and the unpopularity of Obama's Afghanistan adventure; the fact the Bush allies have begun to defend him and his policies in the press; the revelation that Bush was deeply involved in humanitarian activities and policies, particularly in Africa; the fact that Bush kept America safe from terrorism; and the fact that Obama has continued many of Bush's most controversial policies, suggesting that they were in fact the responsible course of action.

I have little hope that the current inhabitants of academia's upper reaches will soon get over their Bush derangement -- they are far too committed to their pet ideologies to be disturbed by mere facts -- but the general public is slowly awakening to the fact that the man they so despised was a good, honest, and possibly great figure.