Washington Post mixed-metaphor watch.

Mixed metaphor? Extended metaphor gone horribly, horribly wrong? You be the judge. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus writes in an op-ed column:

If Kennedy is a dinosaur, we should all -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- lament the arrival of a new political ice age in which the ability to legislate is frozen and bipartisanship extinct.

Poetry. Translation: People usually say that Ted Kennedy is a dinosaur because he believes in outdated ideas about big-government liberalism. In fact, Marcus argues, Kennedy may be a dinosaur because he is willing to work in a pragmatic, bipartisan way with his colleagues across the aisle, and that is a rare quality today. I mean, that is a rare quality in this ice age of post-Cretaceous-Tertiary-extinction-event hyperpartisanship.

I express no opinion on the qualities of Marcus's political analysis. However, I balk at her implication that the dinosaurs went extinct because of an ice age. I believe that the current scientific consensus holds that 65 million years ago, an "impact event" (i.e., a giant, 6-mile-wide asteroid colliding with the earth) was responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs, not an ice age -- although the impact probably resulted in "nuclear winter" type conditions for a few years, which could not have been much fun. Nevertheless, this extinction event is not regarded as precipitating an ice age, the most recent of which began about 40 million years ago, with the last glacial period ending about 10,000 years ago. Or is Marcus suggesting that some dinosaurs survived into the next ice age, and that Kennedy is one of those dinosaurs? Is she hinting that dinosaurs originally invented the bicameral legislature? Who knows?!

Verdict: mixed (or at least seriously uninformed) metaphor!

(As with everything else important in life, I get my facts from Wikipedia: here for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event and here for ice ages.)