According to his new memoir, a 9-year-old Rove affixed a Nixon sticker to his bicycle, prompting a leftist girl child to give him a bloody nose. We must find this girl and make her into a folk hero.

The fable of Rove's beat down at the hands of a little girl also appeared in a 2002 article in Utah's Deseret News, where we learn that the tyke was Catholic and "put me down on the pavement and whaled on me and gave me a bloody nose. I lost my first political battle." The year was 1960, when Rove would have lived in Sparks, Nevada. (I think. Dedicated Rovologists correct me if I'm wrong, but this was between his early youth in Denver and late teens in Salt Lake City.)

Fascinating that Rove connects his political bloodlust to this event, in the manner of a Freudian analyst picking apart a grown man's first sexual experience. Because in the same Deseret article, Rove explains how he became president of his high school class: He recruited "an incredibly attractive senior girl" to chair his campaign and "made my entrance into the auditorium in a Volkswagen Bug filled with incredibly attractive girls. Two girls on each arm delivered me to the podium." Is it possible that a generation of dirty GOP tactics and George W. Bush's entire catastrophic career are all compensation for The Little Girl Who Got Away? Because, sheesh, Karl. Save your pennies, get a hotel room, and deal with your warped sexual aggression the way every other politician does, with the Emperor Club on speed dial.

The little girl knew not what she did, that her fists would launch a thousand campaigns and a war in Iraq. All she knew was that Karl Rove was a snot-nosed punk and she could take him down with one hand tied behind her pigtails. And for that, we salute her. [DailyIntel] [WaPo] [DesertNews]