- NBC News President Michael Gartner in a 1991 review of Lou Cannon's "President Reagan: Role of a Lifetime": "By many measures, the Reagan administration was a failure. It left us with a huge debt and unfocused domestic policy. It got us in a moral mess with Irangate and a military disaster in Lebanon."

- CBS' Lesley Stahl, 1989: "I predict historians are going to be totally baffled by how the American people fell in love with this man and followed him the way they did."

And that's some of the milder stuff. For any of those people now to applaud Reagan even for his optimism and restoration of national confidence suggests yet another reason public trust of the Establishment Media continues to plunge toward the pits.

Scroll Forward.

President Bush, like Reagan, is an optimist and strategic thinker whom self-appointed lofties dismiss as a doofus. He dares to believe Islamofascism can be defeated and democracy established not only in Iraq but elsewhere in the Middle East. He is not the great communicator Reagan was, but has, perhaps, an equal resolve.

Yet the left says about him, as it did about Reagan, the meanest things:

- Al Gore, in effect parading with a sandwich board proclaiming The End Is Near in promoting the alarmist flick "The Day After Tomorrow," charges "the Bush-Cheney administration" with duplicitous ignorance about global warming. Moreover, he cites "arrogance, willfulness, and bungling" in demanding the resignations of six administration officials over Iraq.

- In April, John Kerry termed the Bush administration "the most crooked, lying group I've ever seen." In May, his wife called Vice President Dick Cheney "unpatriotic."

- In September, Teddy Kennedy said of Bush and Iraq: "There was no immediate threat. This was made up in Texas [and] announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically." Last month Kennedy said, "Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management - U.S. management."

- This month, Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota ripped "the Taliban wing of the Republican Party." Ralph Nader, in a May speech, blasted Bush as "a messianic militarist" and "an out-of-control West Texas sheriff."

- In April of last year, Gary Kamiya of Salon.com wrote: "I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings. . . . What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative - four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation? . . . Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world."

Only with Reagan safely out of earshot are some of his most ideologized detractors basking in his success. If the funeral week was overmuch, so some of those lamenting Reagan's death disparaged him in overblown language when he was at the heights. Likewise, their replacements on this bitter ideological battlefield - including the tactical, say-anything-to-get-elected Kerry - are outdoing even the anti-Reagan rhetoric in disparaging Bush now.

Will the moment come when they, too, bury Bush with praise?