There's room in Washington for 'Big Dummy'

Congress' failure to figure out the budget mess means the hole we've been digging for decades isn't any closer to getting filled in. The mess that has been created by the politicians in Washington reminds me of a recent addition to my household.

Last year my wife had the bright idea to add a second dog to our already crowded house of three kids and a cat. She got me to agree to this by promising to help take care of the dog, including picking up the poop, walking it and taking responsibility for various other things that come with pet ownership.

Since in the previous month she had mentioned something about having another baby, this seemed like a good compromise to help her meet her maternal needs.

I should have known better than to expect her to actually take care of the dog. We've had our cat for 14 years, and she hasn't changed its litter box since she was pregnant with our first child more than eight years ago.

She gave me an excuse about cat feces being a threat to the baby while in utero. She showed me some article about it on the Internet, so it must be true.

So I cleaned the litter box for the next seven months. And while I didn't expect her to come home from the hospital with new baby in hand and clean the litter box right away, I assumed this agreement had an expiration date.

She hasn't been pregnant for five years now, and I'm still cleaning the litter box.

The dog we got is a golden retriever. He's a purebred with papers from the AKC. We got him when he was three months old, and my kids named him Buster, but for good reason. I started calling him "Big Dummy."

Note to future dog owners: AKC papers mean your pup is likely to be an inbred nincompoop. Get your dog from the pound; they're smarter.

I should've known there was something wrong with him when my wife's co-worker offered to give us an AKC-registered golden retriever puppy for free. Don't these dogs usually go for 500 bucks?

Once Buster learned to control his bladder and could be let out of his crate to explore things, he managed to destroy our porch furniture, eat a dozen shoes (always only one of a pair, so he's actually rendered two-dozen pair of shoes useless), and gnawed off the appendages of countless Barbie dolls.

He's also very fond of eating socks and my wife's panty hose — which incidentally is not a pleasant thing to watch when it comes out the other end.

The other day I let "Big Dummy" outside for a few minutes. I got distracted, and he ended up in the yard unsupervised for about 20 minutes. When I returned, I found our 85-pound dog with a butterfly net around the mid-section of his body. How he managed to get the ring of the net over his head, and then get both of his paws through it without breaking the ring of the net looked impossible.

If the kids had been home I would have figured one of them had done it to him thinking it would be cute — the way it's cute when they put a hat on his head or a scarf around his neck.

I would have laughed when I saw him if I hadn't been so concerned about him getting back inside before I could remove the net with its three-foot-long wooden handle protruding from his side. He would have wreaked havoc on the living room.

Despite the fact that he's a complete dolt, he really is a sweet dog, and I felt sorry for him. I could tell he was scared by what he had done to himself. So I removed the net, and he ran inside and plopped down in his crate.

For those few moments our pathetic canine, which is slightly shy on grey matter, found himself in a real jam he had created that he had no way of getting himself out of.

Watching our "Big Dummy" was a lot like watching our politicians in Washington. Only when a dog digs a hole, it's never so deep you can't fill it back up.