Kid prez: Seeing the president in St. Paul yesterday (more on that eventually), it's hard not to see his theatrics--cockeyed smirk, practiced eyebrow-furrow, aw-shucks delivery--as somewhere along the continuum between stridently anti-intellectual and downright childish. But as Dahlia Lithwick writes, casting George W. Bush as a doltish kid doesn't serve us well:

[T]he campaign to cast Mr. Bush as a bumbling child ignores the very grown-up machine that stands behind him. Infantilizing the president shifts the focus away from the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Ashcrofts and Wolfowitzes. These are the men who promised us short, easy wars and painless little suspensions of the Geneva Conventions. These are the men of the secret energy-policy meetings. They aren't a bunch of rowdy juveniles. They represent one of the most secretive, powerful administrations in recent memory. Whether the president could outscore your kids on the SAT is a distraction from that fact.