Cleaning Up

Two Parties were contesting an Election in one of the world's numerous Greatest Democracies in the World. After four years, the quantity of mud thrown by both sides exceeded the nation's entire gross journalistic product. The Two Parties were somewhat bespattered, although not very badly because both of their leaders had been planed, filed, sanded and varnished to an inordinate smoothness, and then basted in honey and pig's grease for extra moral authority. The Election, however, was so covered in ordure that it could barely be distinguished from the normal run of day-to-day political discourse.

"Alas!" cried the Election. "Once I was fair and free, the stimulant of vigorous debate and the envy of the foreign and proportionally-represented. Now I am an object of near-universal antipathy and revulsion, and voters bar their windows against my approaching fragrance."

"This is exactly what we have been saying for years," chorused the Two Parties; "whatever the cost to our opponents, it is time to clean up politics."

So the Two Parties voted through a grant to have the mud scraped off themselves at the taxpayer's expense; whereupon each appeared so beautiful to the other that sufficient bipartisan support was immediately found to pass legislation depriving the electorate of its right to a sense of smell.