The Good President (continued) -- The Comeback Kid

From the Washington Examiner:

Remember those billboards erected after anger grew over President Obama's stimulus spending that showed a picture of a grinning George W. Bush asking, "Miss me yet?

Well a consistently growing number of Americans are answering that question with a loud "yes!"

Deep in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll just published is the first hard evidence that the nation is softening on the 43rd president....

 Read the whole thing here.


Slowly but surely people are starting to take an objective view of George W. Bush and his presidency and as they do his reputation rises. Eventually, one can hope, justice will prevail and his greatness will be recognized.

The Good President (continued) -- "In Africa He's a Hero"

When assessing Dubya's legacy, let's not forget things like this:

LUSAKA, Zambia — On a beautiful Saturday morning, Delfi Nyankombe stood among her bracelets and necklaces at a churchyard bazaar and pondered a question: What do you think of George W. Bush?

“George Bush is a great man,” she answered. “He tried to help poor countries like Zambia when we were really hurting from AIDS. He empowered us, especially women, when the number of people dying was frightening. Now we are able to live.”

Nyankombe, 38, is a mother of three girls. She also admires the former president because of his current campaign to corral cervical cancer. Few are screened for the disease, and it now kills more Zambian women than any other cancer.

“By the time a woman knows, she may need radiation or chemotherapy that can have awful side effects, like fistula,” she said. “This is a big problem in Zambia, and he’s still helping us.”
The debate over a president’s legacy lasts many years longer than his term of office. At home, there’s still no consensus about the 2001-09 record of George W. Bush, with its wars and economic turmoil.

In Africa, he’s a hero.

“No American president has done more for Africa,” said Festus Mogae, who served as president of Botswana from 1998 to 2008. “It’s not only me saying that. All of my colleagues agree.”

Impressive! Read the whole thing here.

The Good President (continued) -- "Extraordinarily Intelligent"

That's how Peter Marquez, Director of Space Policy in the Bush administration, characterizes his former boss, Dubya. Here's an extensive quote:

[H]e is extraordinarily intelligent. Forget what you've read in the press. The man is smart and has an incredible memory. He'll remember things that you said months ago or he'd remember some minute detail of some obscure policy issue. He studied the issues and took it as a challenge to know as much about a topic as his experts knew.

For example, President Bush asked all of the directors in the NSC to put together a transition book for the incoming Obama team. Each director was responsible for creating a book that covered all the details of their specific responsibility. I was responsible for space. I put together a 3-inch binder of all the things that we had done and encountered during President Bush's administration. I gave the book to the president and two days later the book shows back up on my desk. In the margins the president had hand-written comments and questions and even remembered a few details on things that I, the "expert", had failed to include. Anybody who says the man is dumb has never met him.

Marquez also found Bush to be exceptionally compassionate, witty, incisive, and serious -- in one-on-one encounters, not on a podium where he, like his father, often became sort of tongue-tied. The picture of the private Bush, confirmed by many of those who knew him, is strongly at odds with his popular image, which was largely a press and political construct fashioned by his enemies.

Read the whole thing here.

I don't expect most academic historians to accept this characterization. They have far too much invested in the portrayal of Bush as dumb, insensitive, and clueless. But I would note that Professor John Lewis Gaddis, who teaches at Yale and is considered "the Dean of Cold War Historians" and who had several one-on-one sessions with Bush during his presidency, has frequently spoken of Dubya as an exceptionally intelligent and well-informed person. 

UPDATE:

To this I would add this article in the American Spectator by Walt Harrington, longtime WaPo staff writer and unabashed liberal who has known Dubya for a quarter of a century and considers him not only intelligent and well-informed, but a principled man who has been influenced by a deep and perceptive reading of history. Dubya is, he writes, "smart, thoughtful in a brawny kind of way and, most of all, a good and decent man".

Goodness and decency -- qualities that are in short supply these days, especially inside the beltway.

The Good President (continued) -- Validating Bush's Response to 9/11

Michael Gerson points out that the major elements of President Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have been validated by historical experience. The Obama administration has, for good reason, retained nearly all of the policy decisions made by Bush and in the wake of the "Arab Spring" revolts it is Bush's "realist" critics, not Dubya, who appear to have been naive and misinformed. Read the whole thing here.

The Good President [continued] -- Education

I well remember how, during the last administration, friends of mine who were professional educators would become almost incandescent when the subject of President Bush's educational reform, "No Child Left Behind", came up. Their contempt for him was boundless. It did no good to point out that the sponsor of the bill was Senator Kennedy [whom they cherished as a great friend of education] or that there was overwhelming public support for accountability, or that rises in expenditure on education had not been matched by gains in student performance for some time and something clearly had to be done. No, they were adamant in their insistence that Bush's reforms were ruining the educational system.

And they were wrong. Enough time has now passed to see the results of Bush's reforms. Writing in the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn notes that tests show that "Bush's vilified education law works".

NCLB’s vision of school reform may be blinkered, and [formerly failing schools] owe [recent] success as much to... gifted staff as... to any outside force. But, as even [hostile] educators admit, NCLB changed the way they taught and led them to reach some of the children who might have otherwise fallen behind.

In other words, score another one for Dubya. Once again he was right, and his critics were wrong. And even Democrats, like the writers at the New Republic, are forced to admit it.

More and more history is vindicating George W. Bush, but so deeply has the Democrat campaign narrative been embedded in our political culture that emerging truth is unlikely to have much impact on people's attitudes regarding one of our best and least appreciated presidents.

Lies of the Left -- The Bush Legacy

Currently left-leaning journalists and politicians are trying to cement into conventional wisdom two particularly pernicious lies about President Bush. They claim, in the face of a mountain of contrary evidence, that the Bush administration did little or nothing to further the peace process in the Middle East. They also are promoting the idea that President Bush "rushed to war" in Iraq, when quite the opposite is manifestly true. Of course, rather than critically examine these claims the MSM simply parrots them as fact.

Read about it here.

The Good President (continued) -- Bush and Truman

Noemie Emery writes:

Bush and Truman got all of the big issues right. Truman saved Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, saved Greece (and perhaps Italy) with the Truman Doctrine, limited the Communist thrust to the areas already held down by the Red Army, and halted the military advance in Korea, with a difficult and sometimes mishandled war.

Bush defined the attacks as a war, not a crime, and took steps to safeguard the American people; liberated Afghanistan, liberated Iraq (in a difficult and sometimes mishandled occupation), that saw the Iraqis turn on both al Qaeda and jihad, and align themselves with the west.

All people remember now of Truman are the Marshall Plan and containment. Soon, all people will remember of Bush will be the ouster of Saddam and the rout of Al Qaeda, and the suitcase bombs that never went off in Manhattan, or in Farragut Square.

Read the whole thing here.

People Follow the Strong Horse

George W. Bush is the strong horse.

He has demonstrated it in Iraq, holding firm when things turned bad, adapting creatively to changing circumstances, and finding a military strategy that is winning the war. Most important, he did not cut and run when everyone expected him to do so. At home he has beaten back a determined assault by anti-war forces and inconstant allies, and now stands triumphant over his political foes. Congress will complain, but it will do as he wants.

Bush's strength has inspired confidence abroad and has changed the international political landscape. In Europe many of his former foes are now out of public life and have been replaced by pro-American leaders. In Iraq, former insurgents are now aligning themselves with the American military. In Afghanistan the Taliban, despite bold words and ruthless action, has not been able to make significant inroads against the pro-American regime and a recent public opinion poll shows that Afghanis overwhelmingly want the coalition troops to stay and crush the Taliban [here]. Now USA Today reports that in Pakistan the public is turning against the Islamist extremists [here].

Slowly but surely the tide is turning in Bush's favor, and the world is better for it.

What is interesting is the extent to which Bush's behavior in the current crisis shows significant similarities to that of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Lincoln's contribution to the war effort consisted for the most part of three things: 1) He held together a political coalition that sustained the war effort in the face of determined opposition from Democrats and public dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war, 2) he redefined American war aims to include an expansion of freedom and compassionate treatment of foes, and 3) rather than despairing in the face of military reverses he responded creatively to changing circumstances and eventually put together a team of leaders who designed and pursued a winning strategy.

Bush, who has read extensively on the subject of Lincoln's leadership, has performed in comparable ways and has suffered abuse not unlike that heaped upon his great predecessor. In the end Lincoln's greatness was recognized. I suspect that at sometime in the future George W. Bush too will be seen as a great liberator.

Consoler In Chief

Bloomberg reports:

Bush, 61, has so far met with more than 1,500 relatives of the 4,255 American troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to White House officials. As he travels around the country, the president often makes the time to console them -- one family at a time, often including children -- in sessions that he calls ``one of the hardest things'' about his job.

In most of the meetings, the aides say, he hears support for his policies, hardening his resolve to stay the course in Afghanistan and Iraq. Little is otherwise known about the meetings, and the White House doesn't disclose the names of participants.

Read it here.

The Bush Economic Miracle Continues

Larry Kudlow has the figures:

Attention all shoppers: Stocks are at an all-time high. Goldilocks lives. The economy could grow by 3 percent in Q3 after growing nearly 4 percent in Q2. Moreover, a highly competitive America is exporting at a 13 percent annual rate, including a 24 percent export gain to China, a 25 percent increase to South America, and a 15 percent export rise to Europe.

Meanwhile, at lower tax rates, the growing economy threw off $2.6 trillion of tax revenues, bringing the FY 2007 budget deficit to only 1.2 percent of GDP or $163 billion. Tax collections for 2007 are roughly $550 billion above the prior FY 2000 peak.

Even spending in 2007 was held to 2.8 percent growth, with domestic spending less entitlement and security actually falling by nearly 6 percent from last year.

So I’d like to thank all you pessimists out there. Your wall of worry is actually driving stocks higher. You have been completely wrong. To quote former Sen. Fred Thompson (who quoted me during the Republican debate), it’s still “the greatest story never told.”

Read it here.

And in another matter regarding the Bush legacy, Bartle Bull writing in the Prospect argues that the war in Iraq is already won. We have defeated the Baathist insurgency, we have defeated al Qaeda, and the Shiite militias are abandoning military actions for political maneuvering. What remains is more on the order of Iraqi police work than American war.

With most Sunni factions now seeking a deal, the big questions in Iraq have been resolved positively. The country remains one, it has embraced democracy and avoided all-out civil war. What violence remains is largely local and criminal.

Sounds like a win to me.

Read the whole thing here.

Bush and the Bureaucrats

One of the most admirable features of the Bush administration has been its determination to bring a largely unaccountable federal bureaucracy to heel. Naturally the bureaucrats have fought back, characterizing the administration's efforts as attempts to "politicize" the government [snicker, as though the bureaucrats were not already intensely political], leaking any information they thought might undermine the president, and feeding talking points to his political opponents.

One of the conduits for bureaucratic rage has been Dan Froomkin, who writes political gossip pieces for the WaPo. His latest hit consisted of a charge that Bush is "incompetent" and has seriously damaged the effectiveness of the permanent government.

What tripe! He asserts that the public, not the political elites, has rendered this judgment on its own, ignoring a determined long-term propaganda effort on the part of Democrats seeking to create just that impression.

He supports this charge by reiterating the Democrats' claims that the Iraq War has been incompetently handled -- a charge that is plausible only if the current conflict is considered completely without reference to other major military actions. In comparison with Vietnam, Korea, World Wars I and II, the Spanish-American War, the Civil War, the Mexican War, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution, the current conflict has been a miracle of efficiency and effectiveness. To suggest otherwise is to display almost unimaginable naivete regarding the nature of war or a disturbing degree of cynicism in distorting facts to serve political purposes. The latter has particularly been the case with factions within the Military and Intelligence bureaucracies who have raised such charges in order to deflect criticism from themselves, or to oppose efforts to reform their agencies.

He follows this with the exaggerated critiques of FEMA's performance under Bush stemming from the Katrina disaster and unsubstantiated [and largely fabricated] charges of attempts to politicize the Justice Department.

His main point is that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove sought to make the permanent government responsive to political authority.

And what, in God's name, is wrong with that? In a democratic system the "professionals" must always remain subservient to political authority. To far too many of the beltway mandarins, the political process is simply an inconvenience to be evaded or marginalized in the interest of effective management. This is a dangerously undemocratic position that can lead to technocratic tyranny, but unfortunately it is all too common in Washington.

I applaud Bush for his willingness to stand up to the professionals and his attempts to restore some accountability to our government.

Read Froomkin's smear here.

Another Diplomatic Triumph for Bush -- North Korea Caves

This is potentially HUGE!

GENEVA — North Korea agreed Sunday to declare and disable all its nuclear facilities by the end of the year, the chief U.S. negotiator said — the first time the communist country has offered a timeline to end its secretive atomic program.

The North Korean envoy, in separate comments, told reporters his country was willing "to declare and dismantle" its nuclear program, but mentioned no dates.

Before announcing the timetable, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said improving relations between the two countries, long estranged, was dependent on a North Korea free of nuclear weapons.

It "is a relationship that we will continue to try to build step by step with the understanding that we're not going to have a normalized relationship until we have a denuclearized North Korea."

Hours later, he said he and his North Korean counterpart had agreed that North Korea "will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007."

Read the whole thing here.

Darn that Bush -- another major diplomatic breakthrough that makes the world a better, safer place. But will he get any credit for it? Don't hold your breath.

Rove Resigns

Karl Rove has announced his resignation and the commentary, most of it partisan hackery, is flowing fast. I suspect that once that dies down an appreciation of Rove's true importance will emerge. Teamed with George W. Bush he won five successive historic elections -- two in Texas three at the national level. This string of unbroken Republican success so frustrated Democrats that they reverted to the most dishonest, nastiest, and most divisive political campaign since the Nixon era. Their main target was Rove whom they sought to destroy. Even so they were only able to eke out a marginal win in an off-year election and now Rove's harshest and most duplicitous critics have been disgraced.

And there was more than partisanship involved. Bush and Rove were always willing to reach across the aisle to achieve important reforms in education, in health care, in foreign affairs and elsewhere. Bush/Rove always swung for the fences and for six years they connected by building ties to reform-minded Democrats and moderates. The nation and the world have been transformed for the better by what they accomplished.

It was not until Democrats lost their third successive election to Bush and Rove in 2004 that the bipartisan record of achievement came to an end on the issue of social security reform. That was not Rove's fault. Democrat strategists felt that mindless obstructionism was their best chance to cripple the administration and to regain control of Congress. They were right, but the sheer duplicity and viciousness of their campaign may have permanently damaged American political culture.

Even in the face of Democrat obstructionism and destructive partisanship, Bush has been broadly successful. His domestic agenda may have stalled, but his foreign affairs record is one of the most significant in history. What is more things are turning his way. France and Germany, once his strongest opponents, are now governed by friends of Bush. Democrat attempts to cripple the war effort have come to naught. Global prosperity is accelerating. Real progress is being made in Iraq as the American military learns to fight and win a new kind of war. Relations with Asian powers have never in our history been better than now, and it is there, not in old Europe, that the mainstream of the future lies.

I think when all is said and done, when all the achievements are appreciated, Karl Rove will be seen as the most important political operative since his idol, Mark Hanna. I think he would be happy to be remembered as such.

Brown Praises Bush

From the Sun:

GORDON Brown last night praised George Bush for leading the global war on terror — saying the world owed America a huge debt.

The Prime Minister vowed to take Winston Churchill’s lead and make Britain’s ties with America even stronger.

Mr Brown stunned critics by THANKING President Bush for the fight against Islamic extremism, and insisted the UK-US relationship will be his No1 foreign policy priority.

He said on his first visit to the President’s US retreat at Camp David: “Winston Churchill spoke of the ‘joint inheritance’ of our two countries.”

The PM said that meant “a joint inheritance not just of shared history but shared values founded on a shared destiny”.

He added: “America has shown by the resilience and bravery of its people from September 11 that while buildings can be destroyed, values are indestructable.

“We acknowledge the debt the world owes to the US for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism.”

Read it here.

Cavuto and the MSM Weasels

Neil Cavuto writes:

There's nothing as refreshing as being with fellow journalists to know just how awful things are in the world — especially when the topic of conversation turns to President Bush.

One after another blasted him:

For the war: a disaster.

For the economy: uneven.

Even for the markets: undeserving.

One reporter even said — and I quote — "the guy's just stupid."

When it was my turn to speak, I said, "Well, he's president of the United States and you're not, so end of story."

But that was not the end of the story, because they turned their criticism to me.

Neil notes the irony:

It is ironic that journalists who pride themselves on their impartiality can be so partial in their hatred — forgetting that polls are fleeting, taking lasting stands are not.

....

History will prove that when this country's chips were down, this president gathered our courage up.

I suspect history will honor that courage, even if a bunch of condescending, second-guessing, weasels-of-the-moment reporters do not.

Read the whole thing here.

Sabotage

One of the most admirable of the initiatives undertaken by the Bush administration is their attempt to bring an out of control and largely dysfunctional Beltway bureaucracy to heel. This is a perilous undertaking for any administration because disgruntled bureaucrats have, in the form of a compliant and sensationalistic press corps and opportunistic leaders of the opposition party, a brutally effective weapon that can be wielded against those who would attempt to exercise direction over rogue agencies. Most presidencies, after a few initial and damaging skirmishes with the leakers, pull back and allow the agencies free rein. The Clinton administration, for instance, rapidly abandoned attempts to reform the military once the political costs of doing so were deemed to be too high.

Not so the Bush administration. They have determinedly pursued reform in the military and in the intelligence agencies. The result has been a series of extremely damaging leaks orchestrated by self-appointed VIPs [veteran intelligence professionals] and unrelenting public criticism from "retired" military officers eagerly broadcast by a hostile press.

The Bush administration has taken major hits as a result of their reform efforts, but has doggedly persisted in them with some success. Now Rowan Scarborough has published a book, titled "Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA" detailing how careerists within the agency undermined the military effort in Iraq and frustrated Director Porter Goss' efforts at reform.

Taken together with Tim Wiener's "Legacy of Ashes" the emerging indictment of the CIA is damning. When all is said and done I suspect that the history of the Iraq War will reveal that the major battles took place within the beltway and not in Mesopotamia, and that the major opponents of victory were not so much unscrupulous politicians, but careerist bureaucrats whose behavior at times bordered on treason.

It's Bush's Fault

AP reports:

WASHINGTON -- Fewer high school students are having sex, and more are using condoms. The teen birth rate has hit a record low.

More young people are finishing high school, too, and more younger children are being read to, according to the latest government snapshot on the well-being of U.S. children. It's good news on a number of key wellness indicators, experts said of the report being released Friday.

"The implications for the population are quite positive in terms of their health and their well-being," said Edward Sondik, the director of the National Center for Health Statistics. "The lower figure on teens having sex means the risk of sexually transmitted diseases is lower."

The report also found:

More youngsters are getting reading time. Sixty percent of children ages 3-5 (and not in kindergarten) were read to daily by a family member in 2005, up from 53 percent in 1993.

and,

More young people are completing high school. In 2005, 88 percent of young adults had finished high school -- up from 84 percent in 1980.

Read the whole thing here.

I blame Bush!

The Bush Economic Miracle -- The Deficit

From the New York Sun:

2004 - $413 billion
2005 - $318 billion
2006 - $248 billion
2007 - $205 billion

The New York Times's Paul Krugman, in December, wrote that President Bush "plunged the budget deep into deficit by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains even as he took the country into a disastrous war." Senator Clinton went to the Senate floor in February of this year to speak of the "fiscal recklessness" of the Bush administration, which she charged had contributed to "record deficits." In March, Senator Schumer, who is now the chairman of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, spoke of "budget excesses of the past six years" that have brought us "a mounting debt to the rest of the world."

But as the shrinking figures above show, in fact the deficit is shrinking. When you look at it as a percentage of GDP, the decline is even more striking:

2004 - 3.6%
2005 - 2.6%
2006 - 1.9%
2007 - 1.5%

As the mid-session review released yesterday by President Bush's Office of Management and Budget says, the 1.5% of GDP figure is well below the 40-year average of 2.4%. It's also smaller than the deficit was in the first three years of the Clinton administration. The deficit numbers would be even better but for the war, though it is costing only $12 billion a month.

Read it here.

Once again the left is systematically misrepresenting the plain facts regarding important policy issues. It is they, not the President, who deserve to be suffering a "credibility gap."

The Corruption of the CIA

One of the little-reported stories of the Bush administration has been its determined attempts to reform the nation's intelligence services, especially the CIA. Unfortunately the corrupt, complacent and incompetent agency does know how to do one thing extremely well -- defend its turf. The agency, led by a group of self-styled VIPs ["veteran intelligence professionals"] has hit back hard against the reformers, manufacturing and leaking information calculated to embarrass and undermine the current administration.

Critics of the Bush administration, many of whom have been highly critical of the CIA in the past, have seized eagerly on this material and used it to support their contention that Bush and his top advisers are "incompetent." That is to be expected in a partisan political culture. But an unbiased observer would do well to discount information originating within the intelligence community -- it is seldom fully accurate, and always calculated to produce a political effect.

Now comes confirmation of the abject incompetence and deep corruption of the CIA in the form of Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes. Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the New York Times, and no friend of the current administration. He is, however, an expert on intelligence activities and has produced a damning indictment.

The C.I.A.’s loudest champions have traditionally insisted that its successes were classified and its failures heralded, and that anyone with full access to the secret record would venerate its role in United States national security since its founding under President Harry S. Truman. With Iraq as the end point, Mr. Weiner’s thesis is instead that from the 1940s on, intelligence gaffes, sloppy covert action and bootlicking in the Oval Office have kept the agency from making the kind of grandiose contributions often claimed for it and, at crucial times, have done this country damage.

Anyone tempted to write this book off as an anti-C.I.A. screed had better look at Mr. Weiner’s sources. The author has impressively studied the archival record, teased out newly declassified primary documents and done numerous interviews to glean as much as can be publicly known about the agency’s history. Some of the most damning criticism of the C.I.A.’s past performance in this book comes not from gadflies or ideologues but from ex-officials and long-secret authorized accounts by C.I.A. historians.

Read the whole thing here.

Whenever I have criticized the CIA's record in conversations with liberals and government bureaucrats, I have heard time and again the statement that we just don't hear about their successes. Well now we do know. There are damn few of them. Information leaking out of the intelligence community has long been, and remains to this day, of limited value. Take its criticisms of current policy and its apocalyptic predictions with a grain..., no make that a shaker, of salt.

The Bush Economic Miracle -- The Global Dimension

The Bush business expansion has gone global.

(Fortune Magazine) -- Just how red-hot is the current worldwide expansion? "This is far and away the strongest global economy I've seen in my business lifetime," U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson declared on a recent visit to Fortune's offices.

That may come as news to many Americans, whose boom-time memories are stuck in the 1990s, when Silicon Valley was the epicenter of our growth fantasies. But the fellow now occupying Paulson's old office at 85 Broad Street in downtown Manhattan shares that upbeat view. Just returned from a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the Middle East, Goldman Sachs (Charts, Fortune 500) CEO Lloyd Blankfein waves out toward the East River as he explains how the rise of the "BRICs" has altered his strategy and his travel schedule. (BRIC is an acronym Goldman coined in 2001 reflecting the rising economic power of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.)

"I helped make my career by being very disciplined about opening offices," he says. Yet in nine months Blankfein has announced or opened offices in São Paulo, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Qatar, and now Dubai. "We've never done anything close to that before," he marvels. "The week before Dubai, I was in Turkey, and before that, Russia and China. I'm really living the BRICs-plus-Middle East kind of life."

These days more and more CEOs are livin' la vida BRIC. GE's (Charts, Fortune 500) Jeff Immelt devotes 12 weeks a year to foreign travel and is looking for his company to grow "twice as fast outside the U.S. as inside - 12% a year, vs. 6%." Immelt expects to see even more robust growth - 20% a year - in emerging markets, which last year accounted for $30 billion of GE's nearly $170 billion in sales.

John Chambers, who last fall opened Cisco's (Charts, Fortune 500) new Globalization Center in Bangalore, seconds the notion that "this is the strongest global trend" of his career. "There is a unique balance today," he says. "More than half of GDP growth is coming from emerging countries. And yet the developed countries are also doing pretty well. It is something we have never seen before."

Read the whole thing here.

Note this, unlike previous booms, is a truly global expansion. The developing world is growing faster than the developed, Europe faster than the US. Real incomes are rising everywhere. The wealth of the world is growing at an amazing rate. The human race, despite rapid population growth, is nearly three times richer today than we were back in the 1970's. The old post-war development models upon which so many of our transnational institutions are based, are hopelessly out of touch with today's reality. These are the best of times..., ever in human history.

Of course this will not last. As Fortune points out business cycles are cyclical and the current boom contains the seeds of its own destruction. Most worrying, growing fear among lending institutions that might produce a sudden credit crunch.

And there is always the possibility of a major war. That has been diminishing in recent decades as the global level of warfare, both international and civil, has been in sharp decline, but it could happen -- remember, just a few years ago India and Pakistan were teetering on the brink of all out nuclear warfare.

And there is always the political factor. Reactionary leftists in Europe and the US could gain power and institute protectionist legislation that would severely inhibit global economic activity.

These are all short-term dangers and at some point one of them or more is bound to kick in, but as Fortune notes, the long-term prospects are much more optimistic.

This is because of deep, structural changes that are taking place all over the world. The tech bubble of the nineties may have burst, costing investors trillions, but the tech industries march on, generating new profits. Global consolidation of production, which a generation ago produced huge profits in the steel industry is now doing the same in other industries. Lending institutions, other than the World Bank which has resisted all attempts at reform, have changed their practices, becoming far more canny in choosing who to lend to and how. The consumer market, previously confined to the developed West is now going global and spurring entrepreneurial booms in far flung reaches of the globe. There will be a correction (there always is) and it may be deep and long, but these changes in global business patterns are here to stay.

What Fortune has not noted is just how much this transformation has been facilitated by American political leaders. The much-maligned trio of internationalist presidents -- Bush, Clinton, Bush -- promoted, over determined Congressional opposition, free-trade policies that brought much of the world into the interactive mix. All three heroically resisted pressures from international agencies and the environmentalist movement that would have imperiled global prosperity. The current administration, in particular, has worked assiduously toward creating new security arrangements, both bilateral and regional, that will replace those old Eurocentric institutions inherited from the mid-twentieth century. These new agreements, on defense, on the environment, on property rights, on nuclear proliferation, and a host of other matters are centered on Asia, and are designed to protect the favorable business climate that has emerged there. These three presidents, especially Dubya, may well go down in history as the most forward-looking in our history since the days of Lincoln and Grant.