If you haven’t yet read Diana West’s The Death of the Grown-Up you need to – because it goes a long way toward diagnosing the myriad of problems facing our country today. Eschewing personal responsibility, integrity, self-sacrifice and wisdom for endless self-absorption and perpetual adolescence, America is rapidly losing it’s ability to deal with the realities of the 21st century. As West says: “No wonder we can’t stop Islamic terrorism. We haven’t put away our toys!”

Contrasting grown-up behavior with immaturity, here’s C. Edmund Wright at the American Thinker, explaining how our current youngster-in-chief benefited from the long-term, focused and sustained actions of mature adults.

When you get right down to it, the successful taking out of bin Laden is a stunning defeat of everything childish about liberal foreign policy and national defense. That a liberal kid was in the White House when all of this happened reminds us of the cliché of the rich kid who “was born on third base but acts like he hit the triple.”

…it is instructive that candidate Obama campaigned against the idea of even killing bin Laden. Now he’s taking credit for masterminding the entire op and the military hating leftists are now ready to call him the return of Patton.
The credit belongs the adults who put in place these interrogation techniques and who decided they would take place at Gitmo. That would be Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Three adults.

So far the only responsible adult action we’ve seen from the Obama administration was the actual decision to take out Osama. Guess they had a grown-up moment on Sunday. Since then, they’re back to floundering around in their own juvenile ineptitude.