This is the grownup party?

Remember way back lo these six years ago when the incoming Bush Administration announced that the adults were now in charge?

Thomas Edsall's column in today's New York Times paints a picture of the Republican party, not the Democrats, as the party of the unbridled, instant-gratification, me me me id:

While inflicting destruction on the Iraqis, Bush multiplied America’s enemies and endangered this nation’s military, economic health and international stature. Courting risk without managing it, Bush repeatedly and remorselessly failed to accurately evaluate the consequences of his actions.

The embroilment in Iraq is not an aberration. It stems from core party principles equally evident on the domestic front. For a quarter-century, the Republican temper — its reckless drive to jettison the social safety net; its support of violence in law enforcement and in national defense; its advocacy of regressive taxation, environmental hazard and pro-business deregulation; its ‘remoralizing’ of the pursuit of wealth — has been judged by many voters as essential to America’s position in the world, producing more benefit than cost.

While some Republican long shots have paid off handsomely (the Reagan administration’s accelerated arms race arguably drove the former Soviet Union into bankruptcy), now the dice are turning up snake eyes. In November, voters concluded that the Bush administration had run one risk too many.

I'm not touting Edsall as some paragon of bipartisan fairness; after all, in the same article he continues the Republican meme that Democrats...

...often insufficiently authoritative and bold, manage risk better? Democrats arguably suffer from their own impaired judgment: utopian faith in the power of negotiation and compromise — naïve, perhaps, in a world where the threat of bloodshed is endemic.

So who are the grownups here, anyway? If anything, the Bush Administration has been the Adolescent male years. Run on the basis of impulse and testosterone-fueled aggression, the Bush Administration reminds one of the kind of teenaged male that drives his parents to distraction for his sheer self-destructiveness, seeking the gratification of the adrenaline rush with little to no heed to the consequences.

I remember when Bush took office, the prevailing wisdom was either that a) it would be OK because the old man (Bush 41) is really going to run things, or b) the illusion that World Trade Center casualty Ron Breitweiser believed, that Cheney would keep him from screwing up too badly. But it's Cheney, like a kind of succubus who has fed off the id-dominated, aggressive, impulsive perpetual adolescent who on paper is his boss, who has added action to the Teenaged Boy administration. It's as if Dad not only gave his 17-year-old son the keys to the Porsche, but encouraged him to drive as fast as the car will go on a rain-slicked road.

The Democrats have been tarred by Republicans since the 1960's as the party of hippies, of moral laxity, of unbridled hedonism -- of perpetual adolescence. But as Republicans are wont to do, they make their assessments ONLY through a prism of who's getting laid and who isn't -- or as we know now, who's openly getting laid and who's getting laid, hiding it, and preaching about sexual restraint. But assuming for a moment that Edsall has a point, that the Democrats lack boldness and are prone to weighing and hand-wringing and an "on the one hand/on the other hand" to decision-making, isn't that what adults do because they have the experience to not just evaluate a choice based on what feels good now (i.e. toppling Saddam) but also on what the potential consequences are (a FUBAR civil war in Iraq)?

After six years of dysfunctional parenting which saw an authoritarian Vice President where everyone else's kids are concerned indulge his own charge's worst impulses, the grownups have finally stepped in and next month will take the car keys away once and for all. Oh, there will be much hue and cry and slamming of doors and putting fists through walls, because that's what teenaged boys who think with their hormones and not with their brains do. But finally the overgrown teenager in the White House will have someone to take away the keys and protect him from his worst impulses.

Because come January, the grownups will be in charge.