Time to Take It Like an Adult

Whining is incommensurate with adulthood. We SWNIDishly hold this truth to be self evident.

That's why we've been irritated by the Obama trope that everything wrong in the world is a problem he inherited from Bush. Not only is that a truism, it's an irrelevancy. At the beginning all problems are inherited, and even with time every problem has a long history of causation. None of that absolves a person of the responsibility to address the problem constructively and effectively.

But Obama's constant Bush-bashing is most irritating because it reflects an unwillingness to stand up and to face life like an adult, to quit assessing blame and start making progress.

The entire left has been operating on Bush hatred since the invasion of Iraq, and only after four years did it begin to take hold. Obama's retrospective bashing is likely on the threshold of exhausting the body politic. No less a liberal journalist than the Gray Lady's Peter Baker says as much today. We doubt that Obama will get the message quickly, as we doubt that he's ever before exhausted the press corp with any of his rhetorical habits. But if he does, we'll consider it a step toward adult behavior, even if it's politically motivated.

But the whining doesn't stop at the White House. Ever in need of enemies on which to blame the world's problems, the left's media organs now turn to the assertion that the killing of George Tiller and the attack on the Holocaust Museum were prompted by the violent rhetoric of conservative pundits and politicians. The ever-insightful Paul Krugman, in a column temperately titled "The Big Hate," blames a cast including Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times ("the Bush administration's house organ"?), Jon Voigt, and the entire Republican National Committee, all fired up by the election of the first African-American President.

Never mind that Holocaust shooter James von Brunn was virulently antisemitic, anti-"Neocon" and attacked the Federal Reserve during the Reagan Administration. Never mind that since Roe v. Wade, with a Republic sharply divided over the abortion issue and a significant number of folk convinced that abortion ipso fact is murder, a total five abortionists have been killed, considerably less than the slaveowners killed by abolitionists in the run-up to the Civil War in a seriously less populous Republic.

This is, of course, another form of whining: the people I don't like are responsible for every nutty thing that happens in the world. We quote again the wit and wisdom of rabbinic scholar and political conservative Jacob Neusner: "Look, we have our kooks; you have your kooks. We don't want to trade out kooks for your kooks."

Messrs. Obama and Krugman, adults do not talk this way.