The Latest Meme - And It's a Good One

In an earlier post, I mentioned the concept, credited to Richard Dawkins, of the meme - the self-replicating idea that spreads through a significant chunk of the world like a virus. (I must repeat again that the viral analogy does not imply falseness or harmfulness of the idea itself). I've certainly been infected with the latest meme, and it's spreading awfully fast; the meme is that real, meaningful change is at last reaching the Middle East.

This can only be good news; even if the meme were false, and I don't believe that is the case, some memes can become self-fulfilling. To see the broad reach of this latest outbreak, I suggest the following:

• the great Christopher Hitchens on a vanquished cliche, the 'Arab street';
• Mark Steyn on the collapse of the Arab's Berlin Wall;
  
• the New York Times on the Mideast's climate change;
  
• Jackson Diehl on a Mideast makeover; and
  
• Thomas Friedman on the tipping point (surely just another way of saying that this meme is raging through the world).
  

Only the most partisan among us could possibly deny that Bush's muscular foreign policy is having wonderful repercussions. If this keeps up, history will think very kindly on 43, indeed.

Of course, we'll have much, much more on this in the days ahead (hat tip to RealClearPolitics for many of the above links, and the Instapundit has more)...