"I wanna be Karl Rove!"
"No, I wanna be Karl Rove!"
"You were Karl Rove last week!"
"So? You were Karl Rove the week before - and three weeks before that!"
"I called dibs on Karl Rove!"
"That's not fair!"
"What' re you gonna do about it...liberal?"
"You take that back!"
"Liberal! Liberal! Liberal!"
Ms. Eberhart noticed that two of her fifth graders were getting into a bit of a tiff in the playground at recess. Little Timmy had little Tommy in a headlock, and was about to clock him on the snout when little Tommy bit his wrist. While she appreciated the Darwinian implications, she had to take into account the angry response of the children's parents, who generally preferred their children to survive grade school.
Ms. Eberhart went over to little Timmy and little Tommy and broke them apart. "Little Timmy? Little Tommy? What's going on, here?"
"Little Tommy is calling me a Liberal!"
"Little Tommy, is that true?"
"Well..."
"You know we don't condone that kind of language on the playground."
"Sorry, Ms. Eberhart."
"Now, then, what was this all about?"
"Little Timmy won't let me be Karl Rove!"
"Little Tommy always gets to be Karl Rove! It's my turn!"
"Now, Little Timmy, Little Tommy, there are a lot of other role models in the Bush administration. Don't either of you want to be...Vice President Dick Cheney?"
"Eww!"
"Ms. Eberhart! Karl Rove is the coolest! He runs attack campaigns against his opponents and then fades into the night, totally invisible, like...like the invisible man, or something."
"It's like, he has this awesome power, and nobody even knows he uses it!"
"Oh, I appreciate back room pols as much as the next grade school teacher," Ms. Eberhart calmly stated. "I think you may not be giving the Vice President enough credit, though. He pushed for a war on a foreign country that was no threat to the United States, a war that benefited his old company, Halliburton, which got hundreds of millions of dollars of untendered contracts for. Isn't that neat?"
"Maybe."
"I guess."
"Does he disappear into the night like Karl Rove?"
"As a matter of fact, nobody sees him for weeks at a time. Some people think he's a holographic image Karl Rove brings out every so often just because the country expects there to be a Vice President."
"Wow."
"Coooool."
"So -"
"Karl Rove has a holographic Vice President in his back pocket?"
"Karl Rove rules!"
"Ah. No. That was just a - look. Dick Cheney is a real human being. He chaired a committee on energy policy where the only witnesses were his friends from the gas and oil industries, then he refused to give Congress the minutes of the meeting. He is in contempt of Congress! Now, doesn't that beat silly old attack ads?"
"But -"
"Back in 1999, Dick Cheney was asked by the Republican Party to head a committee that would name the person who would be Vice President on the ticket. The committee rejected qualified candidate after qualified candidate until - guess what?"
"What?"
"What?"
"What?"
"The only qualified candidate Dick Cheney's committee could find was Dick Cheney himself! Now, you have to admit, it's pretty cool to subvert the electoral process for your own political ends."
"Yeah, but, he did it all in the open, right?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, anybody who wanted to could know what the Vice President did."
"Well, sure, but -"
"Karl Rove wields amazing power, but hardly anybody knows he exists! You can't get much cooler than that."
Ms. Eberhart sighed. "Okay," she said, "what about President Bush?"
"Gross!"
"No way!"
"Hey! Don't write off the President so quickly. He's been a failure at everything he's ever attempted, he's saddled the country with a crushing amount of debt in order to reward his wealthy cronies and he authorized a war on false pretenses!"
"He's a goof!"
"Come on, Ms. Eberhart - I'm smarter than the President is, and I'm only 12 years old!"
"I don't think you boys appreciate the big picture. You see -" But, just then, Principal Skinflint paged Ms. Eberhart and, with an admonition to "play nice," she left the boys to their own devices on the playground.
As she was walking away, Ms. Eberhart heard:
"I wanna be Karl Rove!"
"No, I wanna be Karl Rove!"
"You were Karl Rove last week!"
And she thought: "What the hell. Parent/teacher night isn't for another three weeks..."