The Greek election earlier this month threw out a governing coalition that had negotiated a EU bailout of that nation’s failed economy. The new parliament failed last week to form a government that satisfied the leftist elements’ need to fully reject any austerity measures, so a new, likely more leftist parliament will be elected shortly. Considering that Greece is broke with no hope of paying its debts, rejecting the terms of a €150 bln bailout seems irrational. Thumbing their collective nose at their final lifeline makes no sense except if Greek voters think like children.

Young children are helpless; everything they own and everything they know are dependent on the adults who care for them. That does not stop children from demanding what they want beyond basic care. While the adults are seemingly in the stronger position, children often win the battle over their wants. When a child makes the transition from ward to self-sufficient adult, the adjustment can be jarring – nobody gives adults things simply because they want them.

Socialists play on their subjects’ inner child by promising to take care of the population and ‘give’ them the things they want – much as a parent cares for a child. Too often, as in the case of Greece, the socialist promises are impossible to fulfill. Greece’s credit card is maxed, it cannot afford the pension and work rule promises it made to its people. Gracefully, the rest of the EU agreed to help Greece transition to a realistic level of social policy with loan haircuts and bailout payments. However, like children, the Greek voters are demanding the loan forgiveness and the bailout payments without the cuts to their welfare state. Beggars cannot be choosers, except in the mind of a child.

There are other examples of socialism reducing adults to children. One theory as to why the North Koreans extravagantly bemoaned the overdue death of their Dictator is that they truly believe that everything they have comes from a benevolent father figure. North Korea’s socialist state prevents its people from seeing the obvious truth of their tyranny. The US is not immune; when Social Security and Medicare inevitably fail, the streets will burn even though any rational adult knows that these programs were false promises from the start.

Adulthood means self-sufficiency and the power to act only voluntarily as one deems best. Socialism, as in Greece, means dependency and a return to a child’s mindset. Capitalism requres adulthood because it is the voluntary meeting of people to create and prosper; it requires rational free will. There is no surprise that when the socialist promises in Greece, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere fail, the response is a childish tantrum of want instead of an adult understanding of realistic possibilities.

When Pres. Obama pushes his tax-the-rich policies and general class warfare, he is tapping into the socialist-child connection. Envy and unrestrained want are socialist tools that reduce adults to children. Only a child would believe that a 2000 page document can ‘give’ people healthcare or that life should be ‘fair’ by punishing the rich. Today’s Greece is tomorrow’s US if such arguments and policies remain unchallenged.

I hope the heart rejects him! The Devil will collect his due. He will not be cheated. Knowing that he will burn in hell is little solace to all those he harmed in this life. The Grim Reaper is still waiting just around the bend. – old_sarge commenting at the Huffington Post

V.P. Dick Cheney received a heart transplant last week after suffering progressive heart failure for thirty years. As expected, internet commenters flooded left-leaning web sites with vitriol bravely stating how Cheney deserved to die. Old_sarge’s comment remains on the site, but many others have been deleted, presumably because they are more offensive than his. The left views Cheney as the leader of the Bush equivalent of the SS, a warmonger, and generally heartless (easy fodder for insults, considering his medical condition). This irrational hate exposes the left’s myopia because Pres. Obama’s policies are mentored by Cheney.

Cheney the man is quite the opposite of the foaming mouth lunatic Code Pink portrays. He speaks softly and carries a humble demeanor. He dedicated most of his life to public service, even donating his stock options in Halliburton to charity to avoid the appearance of a conflict. Sen. Kerry demagogued this issue in 2004, even though he was later shown to have traded on inside information himself. Cheney’s enemies make sport of his trademark grimace as a symbol of evil, but a man who has suffered five heart attacks and countless surgeries should be forgiven for smiling less than a OWS hippie with a pot brownie and a cardboard hammer and sickle.

Cheney has always been a hawk. He led the original Gulf War for Pres. Bush (41), and under the younger Bush he is credited with the administration’s overall terrorist strategy. Cheney is either vilified for or credited with preemptive drone strikes against suspected terrorists, the “coalition of the willing” that invaded Iraq, and a fierce battle with the more dovish elements in the Bush administration. Cheney’s critics shout him down as a war criminal that lied to the world to secure an Iraq war. Saddam Hussein, the leftists say, was a tin-pot dictator who posed no threat to the US and should have been left alone.

The worth of the Iraq war is a fair debate, as it is with all wars. However, the revisionist tale that Bush and Cheney deceived the entire world into believing in WMD’s must be rebutted. Well before 2001, Democrats like Hillary Clinton argued that Hussein’s removal was critical to US security. Nearly all Democrats voted for the Iraq war and only shifted their support as things bogged down. WMDs were only one of the rationales for the war. WMDs were simply the excuse they used to distance themselves from their votes.

Ten years later, Obama has adopted nearly all of Cheney’s policies. Obama did not end the Iraq war as he promised he would; rather, Obama won the war by continuing and capitalizing on the ‘surge.’ Obama did not close Guantanamo Bay’s detention center for suspected terrorists; rather he is now using it as a military tribunal center, its intended purpose. Obama has not stopped the use of drone attacks; rather, he has expanded their use to also include US citizens suspected of terrorist activities. Obama did not cease the NSA’s warrantless surveillance programs; rather, he is completing a new Utah domestic spy center.

Obama’s biggest reversal of his anti-Cheney posturing is his illegal and undeclared war in Libya. The extreme left lists Cheney as a war criminal and declares the Iraq war illegal. Contrary to this revisionism, the Iraq war was authorized by Congress, as required by the US Constitution. Iraq may have been a bad idea in retrospect, but it was not illegal. Pres. Obama, however, eschewed his Constitutional responsibilities when he declared war against Libya and continued the war well past the War Powers Act’s limits. Gen. Gadhafi was no threat to the US, and had actually been recently removed from the state sponsors of terror list. Obama is actually more aggressive in deposing tin-pot dictators than were Bush and Cheney, actively working to depose dictators in Libya and Egypt, both non-hostiles to the US. Separately, he has refused to support freedom movements in Iran, and he calls for stability in Syria more than revolution. Indeed, Obama advisor Dalia Mogahed thinks Syria is not doing enough to fight Israel, a US ally. For some reason, Obama deposes regimes where revolution threatens increased oppression, but he is silent where Islamic oppression cannot get any worse. In any event, he aggressively meddles in the affairs of other nations well beyond his predecessors.

Obama’s policies are a continuation and amplification of Cheney’s. He may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he has an impressive body count as well. Why is Code Pink silent on Obama while still calling for the arrest of Cheney? Why does the extreme left wish death on a retired Vice President while the active President continues the same policies they claim to hate? Perhaps the goals of the peace movement are not really focused on peace but rather on the general leftist agenda.