From before his successful 2008 election as President to today,in many venues President Barack Obama is referred to as " the only adult in the room." If one uses a search engine to find out the frequency of this phrase one gets over a half a million hits from Bing and 132,000,000 from Google. Aside from the nasty un-adulting of everyone else in whatever room it is, there is another more important question. What is an adult?

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition tells us that an adult means " fully developed and mature: grown up." Mature gives us" 1) based on slow careful consideration: judgment. 2) having complete natural growth and development." Between the two, one gets the definite impression that adulthood is strictly physical. That is well and good as far as it goes, but what about other factors?

This scrivener would like to suggest a more realistic definition of an adult. An adult is one who takes responsibility for his or her actions and corrects what ever has gone wrong or been proven a mistake. A 3 year old . after knocking a bottle off the table will say that the bottle fell down. If his 7 or 8 year old brother does it, he will blame either his younger brother or the cat if there is one. By the time said youngster is 11 or 12 ,if there is a chance of real adulthood,he will say that he knocked over the bottle and will clean up the mess.

Based on this not unreasonable definition,all of us can readily see that there are fewer adults in general than being fully developed would indicate.  What about  President Obama being "only adult in the room"? Well, based on his behavior patterns, one can easily refer to him as"the three year old in the room". (It makes us happy that he doesn't dress the part!)  Realistically  many of the main players in the current administration like the Secretary of State,the Secretary -past and present-of Defense,the Vice President, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and most of their underlings are under developed children. Nobody ever takes responsibility for any of the previous or current disasters.

Somehow in a huge government that can read e-mails, listen in and record phone calls, harass you with functionaries, and in general, make a citizen's life miserable, the top babies never take responsibility for the plethora of disasters big and small that have befallen this wonderful Republic. Somehow they never were told what was happening. Spin experts are no help. They merely continue and expand the level and constancy of the prevarications.The obvious problem with the petty excuses of the babies in charge of the government is that they are shown to be liars and dissemblers.

At a time when many see the direction of the country as retrograde at best, when serious people can easily point out major errors and mistakes, it is time for real adults to step forward and try to do what the babies in office can't or won't do. Yes government growth must be reversed but this must be done with great care to prevent the destruction of what should and really must be preserved.