As loath as I am to admit it, I owe President George W. Bush an apology.

That became abundantly clear to me the day after election night when the president, roundly thrashed in the midterm elections resulting in the loss of the Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, trooped into the Oval Office and jettisoned unpopular Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. For me, a longtime San Francisco Democrat, it was a very good day, as you might imagine.

That is until my four-year-old son Louie looked up at the television screen that had pictures of the dejected but still petulant Rumsfeld alongside the President and said without a pause: "Are George Wolf Bush and the World's Silliest Troll Donald Rumsfeld making more trouble for us?"

Yes, I had stooped to using my child to express my own political frustration and, with the tables now turned to dramatically, it suddenly occurred to me what a bad lesson I had taught Louie.

It had all started innocently enough. Louie, like a lot of kids, loves to hear spoken stories, any stories, and I had quickly run through the gamut of the old reliable ones like "Snow White," "The Three Little Pigs" and "Jack and the Beanstalk." After the 1,265th telling, I have to admit, the stories got a little dull for me. But Louie wanted more and so I started adding new and exciting details to the old stories. Louie liked when I embellished the tales, but that also got old fast and so I started to make up whole new adventure stories with him as the hero, battling all manner of villains and monsters. These stories hit the toddler jackpot, as he relished the idea of himself in the center of the action, which usually involved Louie on a quest to save his little brother Alex from the nefarious grips of a baddie.

I am not sure quite when that villain in those stories became George W. Bush, but I am guessing it came around the time when the President began to use gay marriage and families as a wedge issue with voters. As he began to demonize my life and rattled sabers about passing a Federal Marriage Amendment to put the definition of a marriage as only between a man and a woman into the Constitution, I got increasingly frustrated and angry. Once, when I was ranting about it to a friend in Louie's presence, he perked up his ears to the conversation and asked why "George Bush doesn't like our family." It was hard to explain to a toddler, so I started to tell a fairy tale instead, making the president a bad wolf--Louie's favorite animal at the time--who was always trying to make dastardly trouble, much like Scar in "The Lion King."

First, I patterned it on "Peter and the Wolf," wherein a group of friendly animals, like our own dog, Cosmo, and others helped Louie capture George Wolf Bush, who was always trying to hurt the family homestead or steal our things. It was a big hit with him immediately and, soon enough, I started to add new characters from the real world to keep things interesting and to give Louie the Knight (he liked that role a lot) more obstacles to overcome. First came Condoleeza Rice, the Dragon Who Could Not Tell the Truth, who breathed fire and brimstone until Louie convinced her of the errors of her ways; then, the Silly Troll Donald Rumsfeld, who lived under the bridge and was always bungling the job; then the Scariest Monster of All Time, Dick Cheney, who hovered over dispensing fear. Paul Wolfowitz was, of course, another bad wolf and Colin Powell became a good wolf who got very, very confused by hanging out with the bad ones.

Louie could not get enough of these tales, so much so that we'd be riding the Muni here and he would beg me to tell him about Condi Rice and that crazy hobgoblin John Bolton (other riders, who did not realize it was a fairy tale, could not believe a small child was asking so intelligently about current events, so I told them he watched way too much Fox News). I especially liked when Louie would ask for the stories in the presence of my mother, a strong supporter of Dubya, and she had to tell the tale exactly as he liked it, being a stronger supporter of amusing her grandson. A friend, comic Kate Clinton, even put Louie into her act, resulting in gales of laughter from the audience about the kid who battled the forces of bad Republican wolves.

Finally, the stories reached their peak when Louie met former Vice President Al Gore at a conference I help run. I had told Louie that Gore had battled Bush in an election using nly words and had sadly lost that fight. "Thanks for fighting the Wolf for my family," said Louie to Gore, who he decided looked like Superman and wanted to know if Bush had used Kryptonite to fell him. Kryptonite, indeed, I answered.

The telling of the stories had started to peter out over the last few months, as Louie became more interested in more complex ones in both books and in the videos he watched, so I had dropped adding more details. But when he saw Bush and Rumsfeld on television last week, I realized I had obviously left a lasting impact on him much more than the amusing lark I had intended. And, I have to say, I felt bad about it.

Not because I like what Bush has done or that I believe any less that his presidency has been a disaster for some many people and for our country. It is because, while I think it important to imprint key values on my children (my top three: tolerance, kindness and fairness), it is not such good parenting to let your frustration seep into the psyche of your kids. It is an easy enough thing to happen--I remember supporting Richard Nixon once in an elementary school debate because my mother did. But, doing so is more an indulgence on my part, then really giving my kids bedrock values to make their own decisions. While having a profound impact on the development of values is surely an important job of a good parent, force-feeding opinions to them is not. The best I could hope to do is to help them both develop enough of a wide-ranging and open mind to make their own intelligent decisions when the time is right.

So after Louie asked if they were up to trouble, I told him they had finally had a big loss and we should just try to forgive them for being so bad to us and say we were sorry. When Louie asked why, I said it was wrong to be mean to people just because they were mean to us. Louie was quiet for a moment as he thought about that and then came to his own conclusion. "Well, Mom, you have to be careful," he said, "because George Wolf Bush still has traps."
That he does, but not this week.

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About this column:

Here's the thing: I fell impossibly in love with the Internet from the minute I saw it in action in the early 1990s. From that moment on, I have studied it, analyzed it, reported on it, and, mostly, have not been without it as a part of my daily life since. If truth be told, it has been one of the more gratifying relationships I have ever had--interesting, challenging, ever-changing, and always new. And yet, I work for a publication, the Wall Street Journal, whose primary business is still print (you know, dead trees), and my only other writing venue has been books (even more dead trees). Thus, in the walk-the-talk spirit reporters like me always demand of their subjects, I think it's high time that I take an ax to a stand of virtual trees in the cyberforest by publishing this online-only serial, a real-time memoir which I am calling "The Louie Chronicles." Centered on the two major Louies in my life--my father who died of a brain aneurysm when I was five years old and my four-year-old son named after him--I hope it will prove to be a good way to write about what it means to be a parent in an era of breakthroughs and backlash. Because here's the other thing: I am gay. And while that might be no big deal in San Francisco where I live and where that classic line about being gay from "Seinfeld"--"not that there's anything wrong with that"--is the de facto city motto, we all know that gay marriage, families, and parenting sits right at the center of the whole noisy and nasty debate over cultural values that has been throttling this nation senseless for much too long now. I don't imagine anything I could come up with would make things any better--you know, the if-you'd-only-get-to-know-us-you'd-love-us philosophy--but I do hope you'll enjoy my stories. And, if you don't--and here's what I really love about the Internet--relief is just one click away. And how many things in life can you say that about?

-- Kara Swisher