Bush as progressive?

Yesterday on NPR there was a fairly annoying commentary by Ken Adelman that painted Bush as a progressive leader because he isn't afraid of enacting policies that 'change the world.'

He said that in contrast, Kerry was the conservative, because, among other things, Kerry opposed Ronald Reagan's progressive policy of creating a massive military arsenal in order to force the USSR to back down. Adelman said conservatives like Kerry don't think that the world will change, but progressive visionaries like Bush and Reagan do believe the world can change.

Nevermind the fact that Reagan's role in the collapse of the Soviet empire is pretty debatable. And nevermind that the former republics of the USSR aren't exactly flourishing right now.

What really gets to me is the implication that a leader who enacts unilateral foreign policy to change the world should automatically be considered 'progressive.' Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin strike me as three leaders who ALSO led their nations in ways that could be considered 'progressive' by Ken Adelman. They all pursued policies that were not agreed upon by the rest of the world, but that they felt were necessary in order to mold the world into their vision.

In fact, there is an even more recent example of a President from Texas (also not elected) who pursued a foreign policy in defiance of much of world opinion: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Is LBJ a 'progressive' leader?

I'd be the last to compare Bush to any of those terrible leaders, but with the intellectual guidance of Ken Adelman, I'm afraid I might just have to start making such comparisons between people like Stalin, Napoleon and Bush. Was that the point of his commentary?