It really has come to this: The president and vice president of the United States are trotting out the emotional appeals of ill-informed elementary school children in order to sell the administration's emotional, ill-informedpolicy response to the Sandy Hook school shooting. Is there a word that combines embarrassing, grotesque, unseemly, and kind of cute? Well, that would describe this campaign.

It is bad enough to make hasty and inappropriate legislation in the name of dead kids. It is bad enough to constantly formulate and sell policy via individual anecdote. It's bad enough to draft pre-Tween children for thepurposes of political propaganda. But all three at once? The word that comes to mind is infantile.