Piggy-Back Avenue: GOP Straw Poll In Cowtown — Peace Rally Co-Opts Texas GOP Straw Poll Pro-Military Crowd Co-Opts Peace Rally

It has the highest concentration of GOP supporters in the nation, behind Orange County, Calif.

Every office holder in this county practically bleeds Republican red, to boot.

In fact, the political environment is apparently so bad here that elephants at the Fort Worth Zoo take their reputations into their own trunks should they even whisper anti-war slogans.

Had Dumbo flown over the American People’s Poll on Iraq outside the Tarrant County Convention Center last Saturday afternoon, it would have been brutal for him: automatic grounding from all high school football games this season.

Though that may sound like a slap on the ear lobe, punishment for less famous pachyderms equals no flights for the entire school year.

But had Dumbo’s mother allowed him to at least use the bright blue portable toilets at the anti-warrior’s co-opt of Texas’ first GOP presidential straw poll, she would have found the event rather, well, uneventful.

Hope, 38, from Arlington, Texas, seemed to have a pleasant time. She attended the rally with around 20 members of the Gathering of Eagles, a nonprofit group that supports the troops and protests anti-warriors.

At one point while she paraded Main Street between 8th and 9th Streets with her banner, she sang along to a rendition of “America, The Beautiful” playing from the peaceniks’ leased stage space.

“I’ve been treated very decently by a lot of the anti-war protestors and really poorly by some of them. They’re just people, like anything else. Some are good and some are not,” said Hope, who failed to give her last name.

Indeed, the level of discourse scribbled on political signs ranged from shrill to sterile to silly: “Hitler Was A Conservative,” “Jesus Against War,” “Retreat and Defeat Is Not A Solution,” “These Colors Don’t Run,” “America Doesn’t Surrender To Terrorists,” “‘Smile,’ You’re On Al-Jazeera TV,” “Cindy Sheehan, The Boogyman Has Got To You,” “Stop Electing Murderers,” “Capitalism Breeds War.”

And all throughout the rally, demonstrators took turns physically blocking their opponents’ banners with their own bodies and signs and street theater costumes; this strange yet playful dance included teenagers, grade-schoolers, and CodePink activists.

“Don’t talk to this guy,” said an unidentified anti-war demonstrator, interrupting the Iconoclast’s conversation with Neill Wilkerson, a Vietnam veteran and grandfather living in Granbury, Texas.

“I’ve talked to a number of these people, and they don’t have a firm foundation in what’s going on with the world,” said Wilkerson. “How many people know that over 100 million Muslims are dedicated to our destruction? I bet if you took a poll you wouldn’t find two or three.”