Will history look back on the first term of what may very well be the first Clinton administration as the high-water mark of using children as political pawns? Because it seems like it's a tactic made infinitely more difficult in the age of the Internet, where we can fact check your urchins. Weighing in on the Democrats' Graeme Frost debacle, Mark Hemingway notes how a similar attempt by Republicans to use a nine-year-old as the poster child for Social Security reform was treated by the left, the same people who are now referring to "The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost". Gee, that's awfully harsh on the kid--last time I checked he didn't sell out his country to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in a time of war.

How did political discourse fall to such a low ebb? That's a topic that James W. Ceaser explores in the Weekly Standard.