Presidential campaigns have come to look like the Major League Baseball playoffs: drawn out, not really as competitive as the media would prefer, and loaded with filler material. Had Barack Obama simply viewed the mass-e-mailing of a photo allegedly depicting himself without his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance through this lens, perhaps this story would have joined other items in the filler graveyard.

But Obama chose to respond. “This is so irritating,” he told a crowd in Burlington, Iowa on Thursday. “My grandfather taught me how to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was one or two.”

According to speech/language pathologist Dorothy Dougherty, the average infant starts babbling from the age of two to seven months, babbles with more sounds by nine months, articulates “real-sounding” words by twelve months, and should use 10-20 words regularly by eighteen months. Between the ages of two and three, children will answer questions with three-to-five word sentences, and have a vocabulary of 450 words.

Granted, like most individuals who seriously contend for the American presidency, young Obama was likely well ahead of the average infant. But his claim that he was taught how to pledge allegiance to his country while most babies are learning to say their own names is downright silly.

Yet perhaps more disturbing than what Obama claims to have known as a baby is what he—and those circulating the photo in question—clearly haven’t learned as adults: the difference between the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem. A video available on CNN clearly shows that Obama’s missing hand-over-heart moment occurred during the chanting of the Star Spangled Banner. And unlike for the Pledge of Allegiance—which, as an oath, is practically always said with a hand over one’s heart—protocol during the National Anthem has always been more environment-dependent. As for the Pledge, the law states that civilians are to place their hands over their hearts and face the flag, but anyone who’s ever attended a baseball game knows that it’s most common simply to remove ones cap, stand respectfully and, if so moved, sing.

Of course, the whole issue of Barack Obama’s behavior has been generated by those who wish to insinuate that Obama is not a true patriot, with one commentator—on an Obama campaign-sponsored blog, no less—implying that “ . . .he is still a Muslim, intent on destroying America.” However, secular dissidents have shunned protocol by either turning away from the flag, or momentarily leaving during patriotic songs. Nor is this Obama’s Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf moment—the former basketball player, much unlike the non-Muslim Senator from Illinois, prayed during the National Anthem.

Obama could have made any of these obvious points in response to the circulated photo in question, if he was so bothered by it. Instead, he sought to rebut it with an embellished depiction of his youth—a campaign theme that is becoming grossly overplayed, to the extent that his official campaign bio contains more information about his upbringing than about his eight years in the Illinois State Senate. By constantly referring to his childhood—and, in this case, resorting to absurd claims about his infancy—Obama is exposing a weird political and tactical shallowness.