My favorite comment on this one (and I wish I’d thought of it first) was from the ever-rampaging Keith Olbermann: “Are You Smarter Than A Third-Grader?”
Me, well, to dust off an old Faux slogan … we’ll report. You decide.
The question, from a real-life third-grader: “What DOES the Vice-President do?”
Aw, that’s something that Piper would ask me, as a second grader, also. That’s a great question, Brandon, and a Vice President has a really great job, because not only are they there to support the President’s agenda, they’re like a team member, the teammate to that President. But also, they’re in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the Senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it’s a great job and I look forward to having that job.
Now, being a teacher, who has known a lot of third-graders (many of them very bright, impudent, and loving nothing more than to play Stump-The Teacher) I’d like to think I’d have been bright enough to step around that big old beartrap. (On nationwide TV, no less.) And having once been a bright, smartassed third-grader myself (and an annoyingly overliterate one at that – just ask Mom) I can easily imagine the sparks crackling through that kid’s brain, as he sets the trap for yet another ignorant, patronizing adult floating around eight miles above her Peter Principle point … who can’t IMAGINE any third-grade kid actually KNOWING anything.
Even if it’s a basic fact of American civics that said smartass could dig up via an instant’s Googling of “U.S. Constitution.”
(I do so envy smart kids today … they don’t even have to walk all the way to the library anymore, let alone scrape off dust and barnacles from ancient two-ton encyclopedias. And then, if they’re particularly bright and/or vindictive, they can even YouTube the whole thing and rub salt in the wound. Has there ever been a better time in history to be a juvenile gadfly?) 
