No, we haven't forgotten the Bush surplus

Speaking of "re-writing history," I give you the Corner's Victor Davis Herodotus Thucydides Hanson:

The Trumanization of Bush? A Public Policy poll lists that an astounding 44 percent of those interviewed said they would now prefer George W. Bush to President Obama. Bush's post-9/11 security protocols kept us safe, Iraq will probably work, and his regrettable deficits and big spending proposals like No Child Left Behind and the prescription-drug benefit, in comparison to the ongoing $1.7 trillion deficts and the $9 trillion more slated to come in the next few years, make Bush seem almost fiscally sound. Maybe the public also sees Bush's post-presidential magnanimity quite in contrast with Obama's tawdry whines about the prior administration. In other words, I think Obama will have to drop "Bush did it" — since it seems to be creating nostalgia in comparison to the current alternative of bows, deficits, apologies, and Chicago cronyism — and far more still to come.

Don't know about you, but I'd forgotten that Bush left office with a budget surplus. Global peace, I reckon, too.

Everything you need to know about the Vietnam War

We won Tet.

No, really.

Doghouse Riley gives Victor Davis "300" Hanson a history lesson. I would put a quote in here, but it's all too good, too scathing, too important.

Ah, but there was passage penned by Hanson himself that I am drawn to like moth to flame:

Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs—including the perception of the ups and downs—of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most zealous zealot

I wish.

They discuss how public opinion among Bush supporters is increasingly out of touch with empirical reality, and cite to a public opinion scholar who argues that "this echoes Leon Festinger's research on the psychology of 'cognitive dissonance' in millenarian sects that believed more strongly in the impending end of the world after their prophecies had failed." [Italics mine.] [The authors] suggest that it is likely on the balance of the evidence that elite driven ideology is leading Republicans to become "so ideological in their view of foreign affairs that they are impervious to information."