'Twas the Night Before Iowa ... (A Visit From St. Reagan)

'Twas the night before Iowa, when all through the state,

The wingnuts were fuming, their heads fat with hate.

The caucus was planned, in just over a week,

Yet the GOP candidates were unelectable freaks!

The reporters were nestled in bedbug motels.

Their noses recoiling from strange Iowa smells,

Of corn syrup fields, and thick manure dollops,

and visions of Newt giving trinkets to trollops.

When out in the lobby there arose such a clatter,

Candy Crowley ran out to see what was the matter.

Out by the remote truck, a big plane had crashed.

And a zombie crawled out with a sackful of cash.

The moonlight it bounced off the black salted ice,

As the undead old man told the same dumb joke twice.

Then he turned mean and weird and his voice was a bark,

Aimed at eight tiny cretins holding hands in the dark.

This grim wrinkled ghoul in his Air Force One slippers,

I knew in a flash that it must be The Gipper!

More vapid than talk shows, more empty than air.

Could this rotten old corpse save the eight cretins there?

"Now Bachmann, now Huntsman, on Ricky and Mittens,

Ron Paul and Johnson, Santorum and Gingrich:

To the top of the polls, to the top of the Oh-Twelve.

You jellybean oafs with the stature of elves."

Like the insane extreme weather the Republicans caused,

by burning all carbon and flapping their jaws,

The eight tiny cretins leapt in front of the jet,

And heaved and then ho'd, which Gingrich liked best!

And then in a news cycle, I heard on the tube,

The prancing and mincing of each GOP dude.

As I drew back in horror and ran for the hills,

There went Crazy Bachmann with a brain full of pills.

The old man chuckled grimly like that Dickens' creep Fagin. 

There was no doubt about it, this monster was Reagan.

He was in a blue suit with a red boring tie.

And his hair was greased back and all blackened with dye.

His dead eyes did glisten, his skin loose and scary.

His cheeks were all rouged, like cough syrup cherry.

His grim lifeless mouth like a wall-mounted fish,

While the cold snow collected his falling-off flesh.

A Chesterfield filter clenched tight in his dentures,

While his imp, Wee Lee Atwater, burst forth from Hell's ventures.

"This fella will help you," Reagan said with a snigger.

"To win next November 'gainst that slick Kenyan Hitler."

Gary Johnson got drowned, no-one knew he was swimmin.'

Herman Cain put his pecker in too many women.

Bachmann was nutty, Rick Perry was frothy,

Like blobs of Santorum in ruined morning coffee.

Huntsman worked for Obama, imagine the gall!

That left only the Newt, Romney and Paul.

A swollen crook piglet in a war of attrition,

A Taxachusetts Mormon who kept changing positions.

And then there was Ron Paul, a fringe whining elf,

At the top of the polls, in spite of himself!

With his harsh words of Negroes and worship of gold,

And he, just like Reagan, about a thousand years old!

The Gipper then read from a cue card in space:

"You keep Rove and Atwater, you can still take first place.

The corporations will still run the wars that they bring,

While you whine about freedom, because facts are   stupid things." 

Adapted from "Desolation Row" by William Jennings Bryan, 1776.