My Encounter With a Tea Partier

I'm walking through a grocery story parking lot when I am nearly run down by a guy driving a jacked up Jeep pimped out for off-roading. While he was pulling into a handicapped parking place.

The Jeep is festooned with Tea Party bumper stickers (Don't Tread On Me, etc.) and enough extra gas cans to travel the length of Baja without stopping. I turn around partly to see the jerk who nearly turned me into road kill and partly to check if the car had handicapped tags. The driver door opens and before his feet hit the pavement he is shouting at me, "You looking for trouble, asshole!" like the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas.

The man is in his mid-forties, stocky with an extended beer belly, muscular calves and excessively skinny ankles. I have seen he has the special wheelchair license plate so I tell him, "Just checking if you're legal" and turn my back to him and enter the store.

Now I know that heart attack victims can look healthy but still need the special plates. I doubt that was this guy. It is much more likely he lied to get the plates because he hates the thought of some elderly grandma with a walker getting special consideration over him.

I've met a few other Tea Partiers and even the best of them possess a malignant contempt for all of humanity that is not themselves. The worst of them would make Ernst Rohm look like the Sugarplum Fairy.

These are not the people a civilized society would want running things.