With the Iowa caucuses now preserved in the fossil record beneath layers of political detritus, there’s finally some real extinction news to report. Initial score: GOP 5, Darwin 1, or maybe, just maybe, GOP4, Darwin 2. This is more like it!
While our Mesozoic misfits managed to stay alive through a series of low-expectation debates, Iowa is where the rubber hits the road (in an ethanol-fueled pick-up truck with an “I support the troops” (as they risk their lives to protect our petroleum interests in dangerous places) bumper sticker).
The previously reported extinction of Gropasaurus hermanii really had nothing to do with the debates, but rather his reptilian behaviors which finally caught up with him. Even in the rough-and-tumble Cretaceous, you can’t be gropin’ on people just ‘cause they want a job. That might have worked in the Jurassic, but we’ve evolved since then.
But, I digress... Let’s get back to the caucus fall-out. You know the drill: follow along below the coprolite for your Iowa dino-caucus extinction update…
Archeopteryx bachmannii – our first official extinction, this sad creature finally realized in the nick of time that the “path forward” led into a bottomless tar pit. Despite having been personally tapped by Skyasaurus to launch a presidential campaign, world domination was not to be. The fossil record will remind future dino-candidates: always check caller ID and make sure you know who’s on the other end of the dinophone. Others, including competitors, had long since written off this small and shrill female, but A. bachmannii dances to a different mating call, and it would not be “over” until the fat hadrosaurus sings. Her mate, the always disturbing Marcasaurus, helped to maintain A. bachmannii’s ill-fated campaign ever-changing hair and facial camouflage and wardrobe and whispered talking points. Some speculated that A. bachmannii was in fact little more than a sock puppet, sent across the land to do Marcasaurus’ bidding. Either that, or he was doing something in the bat [shit crazy] cave that wouldn’t benefit from her presence.
Stegasaurus newtii – lashing his spiked tail in anger at his fall from brief uber-competitor status, this morning finds our bloviating beast is more “smarting” than “smart”, seething at the injustice of facing unrelenting attacks from Brontosaurus romneii’s DinoPAC. Lacking the resources to mount any credible response, S. newtii has fallen back to what’s worked in the Jurassic: calling your dinopponent names and getting angry. Really angry. So angry that other lifeforms are emerging from their caves and burrows and laying in vast reserves of thermally expanded maize products for the upcoming season. Unperturbed by these developments (or by anything, really), the helmet-headed, fixed-stare Callistasaurus tiffanii, still gazes in adoration at her mate, her perfectly symmetrical smile undaunted. Then again, these may be the irreversible effects of decades-long use of botulinum toxin and volatile organic compound laden hair care products.
Cerebrosaurus huntsmanii shunned the evangelical hinterlands of Iowa for the more traditional hinterlands of the Granite State, but still garnered votes from the more highly evolved Hawkeyes. As previously reported, there is little remaining doubt that C. huntsmanii is in fact a mammal, as evidenced by his high intelligence, warm blood, functional family unit structure, and exceptional communication skills… and his vision in steering clear of the Iowa dino-caucuses.
Libertariasaurus paulii proves that a foolish consistency really is the hobgoblin of small minds. This wily septuagenarian Texasaur has beaten the actuarial over-under for so long that some suspect it will never go extinct. A third-place finish ensures that we have not heard the last of its cold-blooded Randian pronouncements that suggest a return to the dino-eat-dino days of the early Triassic, where the poor, the sick, and the hopeless had the collective good sense to go extinct on their own. By promising young dino-volunteers that he would reward them with legal access to cannabinoid vegetation, L. paulii has continued his march to the White Cave, resting periodically in the Permian Basin to recover his strength after tiring appearances with the Great Unwashed.
Gaffasaurus perrii, through his fumbling, stumbling, bumbling, Brownian motion campaign, has avoided extinction thus far, against all odds. After a lackluster showing in the Iowa dino-caucus, his late-night remarks claiming that he would return to his Lone Star Cave to “reassess” his “path forward” had many believing that his Reign of Error as a presidential hopeful had ended. Now, it appears, G. perrii may in fact be headed to the swamplands of South Carolina, if his latest tweet is representative of his plans and not just the result of dino-pocket-dialing. Nothing could be gleaned from his slurred, incoherent post-caucus “speech” other than support for the rumored possibilities of altered states of consciousness.
Brontosaurus romneii emerged as the “winner” of the dino-caucus by the thinnest of margins, a mere 8 votes, but enough to convince him to scrap his undoubtedly soporific prepared remarks for a turbo-speed, random-walk, ad-libbed series of incomprehensible (and utterly unpresidential) vocalizations. It will take eons of collective decay of many more dinosaurs to generate the petroleum-precursors to create the plastic that would go on to become B. romneii. Nothing to date has enabled this boring behemoth to exceed previous Iowa dino-caucus percentages. Even the expenditure of millions of dino-dollars by corporate coproloids cannot turn plastic to flesh, and inspire the masses that they should back the tedious B. romneii as their inevitable leader.
As if to underscore the previous point, Struthiomimus santorum emerged as the true winner, if for no other reason than that he can string together multiple sentences and convince an audience that he is really a pious, caring, family man (as long as “family” meets his paranoid preconceptions). Not only did S. santorum attain virtually the same number of votes as B. romneii, he did it without eviscerating his opponents, and without B. romneii’s vast (or half-vast) resources. Whether S. santorum can maintain this charade in non-evangelical terrains is debatable, but his performance in the Iowa dino-caucus is a proud moment for this otherwise despicable dinosaur from the Pennsylvanian carbon fields.