Has the Bush turnaround begun?

When the Final Accounting is done, one thing is certain: George W. Bush will be among the worst presidents of all time.
It's absolutely beyond debate now. Bottom three, for sure (I can't think of who might lift him out of dead last, but I took American History too long ago to say there wasn't somebody so blind, depraved and addled by his own ideology that he might boost Dubya out of the cellar). Compared to Bush, Richard Nixon is Albert Einstein in shining armor, rescuing babies and bringing a cure for cancer. The American people have caught on, as polls have shown for months.
And yet there is talk of a resurgence.
Most of it so far, to be sure, has come from the Pentagon and the deepest, unmovable bowels of the Republican party. But it's beginning to spread.
"The surge is working," says the military, which executed the surge.
"Our military says the surge is working," says the GOP, which conceived the surge and has made itself the sole source of news about its effectiveness. "Al Qaeda and its North American wing, the Democrat party, are giving ground."
"The administration says the surge is working," parrot the national media, still trying to ignore the way they cowered and cringed before the frenzy of symbolic patriotism after the World Trade Center attacks. Flags fluttering from the antennae of 50 million SUVs made editors and publishers all over the country forget that their duty was not to their advertisers or stockholders, but to their readers and viewers.
Two months after the 9/11 attacks, when the president's approval hit 85 percent, I wrote that "Osama bin Laden is George Bush's best friend. If it weren't for him, Bush's approval rating would be 32 percent and falling."
It took awhile, but 60 days ago the president's approval was 32 percent and falling. I gloated unbecomingly.
It isn't much above that now . . . but the slide seems to have stopped. After just the faintest, undocumented reports of unspecified "improvement" in Iraq, a Pew poll has found that "nearly half" the American people believe the war is going well, up from one-third in June. That's had its effect on those Democrats, still a majority, who've lacked the stones to take on the president or the wit to deal with charges that questioning his policies is treason. Some of them now are backing away from criticism of the war, fearful that if the U.S. salvages something the GOP can call a victory, they'll be counted among the defeated.
And the president's approval ratings are creeping up. The San Francisco Chronicle speculated Sunday that if there's a perception the troop surge has worked, "President Bush could be off the ropes and Republicans back on the offense. The Democratic Congress and presidential candidates could lose their footing on their biggest issue, and U.S. troop commitments and war funding could be set on a higher, more permanent trajectory."
Well, wouldn't that be good news?
Violence in Iraq has not ended. It is now about where it was in January 2006, when the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra set off what most agree was a civil war: Just your average 50-or-so-a-day dead folks.
According to the pollsters, though, if things continue as they are until spring, when Gen. David Petraeus says the surge must end, then all the lies, the years of administration bungling, the equivalent of the population of Sparks dead in the desert, two generations of Americans buried in debt and hatred for the U.S. spread throughout the Muslim World, all will count for nothing. The news will be good, and the president will be off the ropes.