No, not Flushing, New York, the city in Queens where my beloved New York Mets play in their antiquated stadium. I’m talking about flushing, the verb.

It’s my proposal for a constitutional amendment mandating a total flushing from the Washington beltway all politicians, lobbyists, journalists and correspondents every sixteen years — the Flushteenth Amendment.

Just get rid of them all. Pull the chain and suck every one of the worthless polluters down and out the beltway drain. We then start fresh with a clean bowl of eager congressmen, senators and the assorted cronies-in-waiting that gravitate towards all ower bases. When the area becomes dirty with their eventual wicked waste matter, flush them out again. Remove the safety net of incumbency.

Why is this good and why do we need it? I’m glad you asked.

In most seats of power, a local town hall or a national capitol, it doesn’t take long for decay, depravity, toadyism, mutual hand washing, ass-kissing and favoritism to leave their lethal little droppings. It’s inevitable and we should be mature enough to expect it. We can only hope that before the sixteen years are up, the governmental porcelain container doesn’t get too dirty with, well, with the stuff that makes such containers dirty.

We have always managed to survive most contaminated governments and regimes — Mayor Curley in Boston, Tammany Hall in New York, Tom Prendergast in Kansas City and the Harding Administration, to name just a few. What’s changed since then, of course, is the pervasive influence of the most corrupt force in our contemporary culture — the media. The media’s sinister influence magnifies the natural tendency power centers have towards inefficiency and corruption.

When the media were mostly newspapers and magazines, they usually reported the news straight up. They also investigated rumors of scandal, exposing them to a public that was shocked by those revelations and filling with shame the guilty culprits. Shame is now obsolete, made extinct by spin, which in turn softens the impact of most transgressions to the point where we the people are unshockable. Or shell-shocked. We’re like prizefighters somewhere in round twelve who’ve been pummeled so thoroughly that we can’t feel the punches still hitting us.

Our system would work better if journalists asked tough questions and held to the fire the tap-dancing feet of the politicians they interview. But they don’t. They have instead celebrated spin and process over ideas and content and deadened our sensibilities to shame, an emotion that the sophisticated media coifs never discuss. Not cerebral enough. They’d rather explain how shame was transmogrified into political hay by the political parties.

The media are also invited to the political dance. Hell, they filled out the dance card and brought the orchestra. They frame the issues for maximum titillation and decide who will get air time on their shows. Russert, Scheiffer, Georgie Boy, Cutie Katie and the rest of the highly coiffed and pampered pretty people also socialize with the subjects they interview and are invited to the same beltway parties. Further, they are celebrities, having reached that status envied by most politicians, some of whom have already attained that level of recognition.

Celebrities are a special tribe. They know who they are and coalesce in a rarefied ghetto of fame, notoriety and elitism. The ghetto is a small and expensive one and they take care to protect one another. They will never harshly criticize their celebrity colleagues, be they politicians or reporters. To do so might wipe them off the party invitation list.

If Russert or someone else really nailed you for what you thought was premium B.S. would you return for more of the same? Would Nancy Pelosi put Tim in her appointment book if he demanded to know why she blew a fuse when President Bush wanted to fix Social Security but batted her baby blues when President Clinton said it needed fixing back in the late nineties. (Anybody remember Gore’s lock box?) Hypocrisy, anyone?

If Timmy asked such a question, you’d hear Pelosi doing a Fred Astaire around an answer that wasn’t an answer. If Russert had the stones, he’d then ask, “Respectfully, Congresswoman, if it was a good idea when Clinton said it, why is it a bad idea now that Bush says it? Huh? Huh?”

Do you think a politician would return for another visit after a grilling like that? Hardly! Holding politicos to account would make Russert, et al, personae non potatoes-au-gratin on the Beltway dinner circuit and Pelosi would refuse to come back on his show. If Tim did this to enough politicians, they also wouldn’t guest on his show, his ratings would go down and he’d be out of a cushy job. And he wouldn’t get to wear his tux and spill chicken gravy on his cummerbund at those fancy dinners.

So, let’s take the pressure off them. Off all of them. Let’s pass the Flushteenth Amendment and bring fresh, clean water into the Beltway bowl every sixteen years. Right now the clowns governing us now are safely entrenched and more entwined than a thousand person orgy. Flush them home. Flush out the politicians and lobbyists, the interns and gophers, the campaign managers and faux news people and we might enjoy three or four years of new, idealistic, energetic Beltway workers before they start to contaminate the government and our country. It’s time for the American people to clean out the pipes and get rid of the B.S.