While in car on the way back from Virginia Beach on Wednesday, my mother's dogs Sazi and Sadie, who generally get along famously, suddenly began snarling and biting at each other. The scene of the dog fight in the rear-view mirror was intense. They were apparently fighting over which dog would have the right to stick its head through the space between the front seats and drool on the stick-shift. Good reason.

Yesterday, during the annual US Senate "class photo," Vice President Cheney reportedly told Senator Patrick Leahy to "go fuck himself." The bones of contention here were Leahy's comments on Halliburton, and Cheney's reference to "anti-Catholic" US Senators. Childish? Yes, although, it would have been fun to see them fight each other. There wouldn't be much hair-pulling, though.

I remember when I was 12 or 13, my schoolboy chums and I would spend our time teasing one another, calling each other mean names. Sometimes, mean names would grow to drawing large presentations on the classroom white boards before the teacher would arrive. In one instance, we had huge drawing of a classmate's head, surrounded by cosmic objects (moons, comets, asteroids) and starships which were firing their weapons at the head. The insult of course was that he had a really big head. The starships couldn't begin to make a dent in it!

This unnecessary meanness occasionally lead to fist fights or other forms of violence -- sometimes a door was smashed in someone's face as they walked into a classroom. It was all stupid. But we thought we had our reasons -- a mean thing was said a year earlier, or he said Nintendo was better than Sega, or he was a dork and deserved to be harassed.

One guy started a list to tally up all the comments that we had made about him. Our response was to seize the list and destroy it. A second list was born. And so it went...

When I think about the dogs snarling, Cheney using the f-word, and my exploits as a young teenager, I am prone to laugh, because all three situations are ridiculously silly. Unfortunately, Cheney and Leahy are not dogs fighting in the back seat of a car or teenagers trading insults. They are the "leaders" of our country. Grow up the f*ck up, guys. We don't need any chair throwing like they have in some of the other representative-bodies in the world. Although... it would be fun.

-- Kevin Rollins