Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington

There is a tremendous rumble and the Simpsons' house shakes. There is a new flight path to Springfield International Airport overhead. A complaint to an airport official has no effect, and the house is now unsellable. Homer and Marge then go to their congressman, who has been Springfield's representative since 1933. He is so upset by their misfortune that he drops dead.

Bart asks Krusty the Clown to run for Congress and he agrees, thinking he can also eliminate everything with which the Government is harassing him. He is adopted as the Republican candidate. His campaign starts badly because he has offended so many minorities with his politically incorrect jokes, but Lisa helps him turn his campaign around by having him connect with regular families and citizens. With this advice and a very helpful Fox News programme, he is elected.

To Krusty's chagrin, no-one pays attention to a freshman Congressman, and he is set to work cleaning the graffiti off the walls. He, and the Simpsons, are about to give up, but Walter Mondale, who is working as a janitor in Congress, explains to them how a bill really becomes a law. With his help, Bart blackmails a key congressman with a videotape that shows him abusing the free mail policy. Homer manages to get another congressman drunk (and himself as well). Finally, during a session in Congress, the janitor and Lisa, with Homer's drunken diversion, fix the Air Traffic Bill with a paperclip to another bill giving orphans American flags. When the bill comes up for a vote, both the blackmailed congressman and the drunk one consent, and it is passed. Krusty praises the processes of democracy. At home, the Simpsons are happy to get the peace and quiet that they heroically fought for. Homer says that the planes are now flying where they belong — over the homes of poor people.

At one point during the episode, the family is watching Krusty and his opponent debate on the Fox News Channel, which showed several headlines in its news ticker that parodied the right-leaning network's political views. Among the headlines in the news ticker were "Pointless news crawls up 37 percent," "Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com," "Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer," "Dow down 5,000 points," "Study: 92 percent of Democrats are gay," "JFK posthumously joins Republican Party," and "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple." Several months after the episode originally aired, Matt Groening claimed that Fox News, the corporate sister to the Fox Broadcasting Company that airs the show, threatened to sue Groening, but opted against "suing itself." Groening mentioned that while they got away with the joke, they were no longer allowed to parody news tickers on the show.[1] Despite that, the show would still parody Fox News on several occasions afterward.[2] The Dow Jones & Company, which owned the Dow Jones Industrial Average that was parodied in the news ticker, would be purchased by News Corporation in 2007 and would be a corporate sister to Fox until the 2013 split between the new News Corporation and 21st Century Fox, which was further split with the acquisition of the film and television assets of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company on March 19, 2019, with Fox News Channel now part of the Fox Corporation.

The episode title is a reference to the movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington".

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• "Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington" at The Simpsons.com
• "Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington" at IMDb
• "Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington" at TV.com
• Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington script at Springfield! Springfield!