BETTER LUCKY THAN GOOD? (via most of you):

The triumph of George W. Bush: Mark Steyn says the armchair insurgents have got it all wrong: the President is winning the war against terror, and the Democrats are facing humiliation in November (Mark Steyn, 12/27/03, The Spectator)

[I]n the last fortnight the good news came so thick and fast that we Bush stooges in the media barely had time to re-type the White House press releases: Saddam surrenders; lots of big-time Baathist dead-enders rounded up by the Americans, and various small-time Baathist dead-enders more brutally dispatched by their countrymen; Gaddafi throws in the towel on his WMD programme and scuppers Iran’s and North Korea’s in the process; France, Germany and Russia cave in to Jim Baker on forgiveness of Iraqi debt....

No doubt Prof. Barnett thinks this is further proof of how swimmingly things are going for Osama. The rest of the naysayers seem to have settled on the BBC/Reuters/New York Times tack that, even if these are all positive developments, they’re nothing to do with Bush. [...]

For whatever reason, things are going America’s way, and are likely to continue to do so. The only real argument is about the speed at which they do. How good 2004 is can be measured by how well some of the following turn out:

To which we can add Ariel Sharon's decision to impose statehood on the Palestinians, the US-brokered talks between India and Pakistan, the election in Georgia...

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2004 11:12 PM