Socialized pit bull

One thing I learned at the Tax Day tea party was that teabaggers have an uncanny love for dogs. One of them, a lady with the face of a handbag, even set down her “Protesting socialism is not racism!” sign just to gush over my new pit bull.

“Is she friendly?” she asked.

“Yeah, but we’re trying to socialize her,” I said. Believe me, as soon as that sentence slipped from my lips, I realized I should have taken just one more second to search for a more appropriate choice of words. “We’re trying to get her used to people,” I corrected myself.

I brought our new dog, Freya, to the Tax Day tea party not for political purposes, but because I’m still not confident about parading her around huge groups of people. We just got Freya from the SPCA a few weeks ago. She’s a pit bull, and I’m told they have a lust for murder. If Freya bit a protester, the teabagger philosophy wouldn’t allow them to call the cops, the pound or any other government agency that might help them.

As Freya and I walked through the mass of people, I wondered why making a statement often encourages people to dress up like morons. What I’m trying to say is, in the same way hippies love tie-dye or rappers love Bedazzled jeans, teabaggers love the shit out of Paul Revere hats.

Fashion aside, I met some really nice teabaggers—maybe 15 of them. They were so stoked on my dog that when they spotted Freya, their angry politics bursted into a little cloud of love. Which is weird, because when I brought my dog to the Davis Farmers Market last week, the intellectual freethinkers clutched their children so hard and walked so fast that they looked like those illegal-immigrant-crossing signs in San Diego. It was almost as if I had a drooling sexual molester pulling on the other end of the leash.

The teabaggers, however, were pleasant to my dog; in fact, the only part of the rally that really disturbed me was the little kid who had had so much snot running down his face that he looked like a tiny Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.

In all, nothing crazy happened at the tea party, aside from the lot of confused souls who selectively forgot about certain parts of history, like the part where the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was actually a protest against a tax cut. Or the part where President George W. Bush was a complete fucking idiot who spent more than Lyndon “Brokeass” Johnson.

I didn’t see a whole lot of blatant racism (except for the “Linch [sic] Obamacare” sign). All I saw were a bunch of people who would never agree with me politically. But it doesn’t matter; politics don’t unite people. On the other hand, cute dogs might.