Election Shock Treatment

From the Weekly Standard:

WITH THINGS LOOKING UP for a change, this has been a rough patch of time for the Democrats. They have been suffering from Election Shock Treatment; which means the success of the Iraqi elections has shocked them into the realization that they may have to seek treatment, because of the trauma induced by the growing suspicion that President Bush has been right all along: right in the decision to go into Iraq; right in the decision to hang tough in Palestine; right in the belief that Muslims and Arabs may also want freedom; that elections there can be held, and succeed.

But even before this last "bad" (read, good) news, things had turned grim for the quagmire addicts, with the terrible realization that events elsewhere had not taken a turn for the worse. In August 2004, for instance, Australian Prime Minister John Howard was not defeated for his sin of backing Bush in the Iraqi invasion, dealing no blow at all to the Bush coalition. Then the Afghan elections went all too smoothly, despite the fact that the country, three years earlier, had been a perfect model of 13th century governance. Then the Palestinians, after Arafat's death, had the gall to start edging somewhat away from their ideological precipice, suggesting we might face a third non-disaster, a prospect too ghastly to contemplate.

In December, some of the savvier commentators had begun suggesting that Bush's democracy project was showing signs of working, and Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Winston S Churchill, had written
that Bush and his main man Tony Blair might stand some day with Churchill and Roosevelt. Among the in crowd--which had been appalled when Ronald Reagan, the amiable dunce, was declared by serious people the liberator of the people of Communist Europe--the idea that history might repeat itself was too much to bear.