The NYTimes' grudging acknowledge of George Bush

Today's NY Times has an optimistic editorial about the amazing changes in the Middle East:

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians. Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing.

I'm fine about even this guarded approach to celebration. It's high time the MSM abandons the pervasive negativity that has been characterizing its approach to the glorious revolution that appears to be taking place in the Middle East. No, what I object to is this sentence:

The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances.

Why does the Bush administration get only a "healthy share"? The Bush administration, in my mind, is entitled to go around dancing through the streets, shouting "I told you so, I told you so." The entire credit for this Springtime in the Middle East belongs to the Bush administration. Everyone else who contributed was just trailing in the administration's wake. Is it too much to ask the NY Times graciously to acknowledge this fact? Well, yes, I guess it is.