This column ran shortly before the last national election. Bon appetite.

We recently visited Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park in South Dakota. Wonderful places. I suspect most of you have not heard of these two parks, because they don't receive near the publicity as Yellowstone or Grand Teton. I suppose I should hope that they never attract the hordes of tourists these more famous parks endure, cause that would wreck things. I'm selfish that way. We had both parks pretty much to ourselves, except for the animals, and they were great!

We saw hundreds of wild animals in their original habitat, all acting uninhibited and natural. The grass prairie was peppered with herds of massive bison and thousands of tiny prairie dogs. Margins of the wooded areas revealed grazing mule and whitetail deer, and elk. Pronghorns stood out in the sunlight, highlighted by their vivid colors. And hawks soared above it all on thermals of joy.

No fences kept the animals off the roads or the people off the prairie. And although most of the human visitors were house trained, the animals clearly are not. The roads were conspicuously decorated with bison poop, which can best be described (you aren't eating now, are you?) as five pound plops of soft serve ice cream. Bison weigh in at one to two thousand pounds, and they recycle grass in prodigious amounts.

You can miss some of these road pies while driving around, but the law of averages catches up to everyone, and so you can plan on hosing off the bottom of the car when you get home. Which brings me around to my latest fantasy...

Historically, sitting presidents travel about the country in those last few weeks before elections kissing babies and wrapping their arms around the shoulders of their party's candidates, hoping that something good will rub off to collect a few votes. Popular presidents significantly improve a candidate's poll numbers simply by showing up. But when a disaster president visits, it can be the kiss of death to an election campaign, if some of the horrid performance adheres to the candidate.

Guess what is happening this time around?

It seems that the few candidates our current president will visit in the coming weeks have such large leads that the desperate man hopes to receive a boost for himself, rather than the other way around.

South Dakota sent a young congressperson off to Washington a while ago, hoping for good things from her. Folks in South Dakota have their feet firmly planted on the ground, and if you have ever experienced the wind there, you would understand this. So you can imagine how outraged those honest hard working people became as they watched their young congressperson voting with Nancy Pelosi time after time. Many in South Dakota farm the land, and they recognize bull “bleep” when they see it. The congressperson's re-election campaign is in trouble, and you won't see the current president dropping by to help this young lady, cause he's really not welcome there, or most anywhere anymore.

But I understand that the Democrat party is sending the first lady out on the stump, trying to prop up some failing election campaigns, cause they can still find a few people in this country who don't dislike her. So she just might show up in South Dakota in my fantasy. And of course, she would have to do the obligatory photo op at Mount Rushmore.

Now, I doubt Michelle or her hubby have much use for Mount Rushmore or those four dead white guys on it, cause those men are hardly relevant to the direction they want the country to slide. But they are savvy enough to realize that a few of us old fools still like the monument and what it once stood for, so if they have a chance at conning folks again in this election, they have to keep up the pretense.

So after the usual speeches and interviews in Rapid City, in my fantasy Michelle would enter the long black armored limo, and with the seven black armored Suburbans in line, she would head up the hill to the visitor center to stand before the cameras, and those four faces. And after that staged show, she might also be shuttled around the mountain to visit Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park. Cause this all would look so good on the 6 o'clock news.

And if my fantasy comes true, Michelle steps out of the limo at a particularly scenic spot, and plants her size 13's into a still warm and fragrant, perfectly sculpted plop of bison poop. And she like-totally ruins a brand new pair of Gucci's. She will be DISTRESSED!

This story could end here, with what many would consider a happy ending, but not in my fantasy. No, I'd like to see where this would go given the current climate in Washington. The minions inside the Beltway would swing into action before the last dollop of putrid poop dripped from the toe of Michelle's shoe.  Something must be done to rectify this horrid situation, left over of course, from the Bush administration.

This is a perfect “shovel ready” project. So I have no trouble believing the current administration would come up with this solution:

Diapers. We need diapers, in extra giant size, for each and every bison in those two parks, so that no American will ever again step in bison poop. And we will need to change those diapers, several times daily, on each and every one of those hundreds of bison. Every time a diaper becomes soiled. Lots of diapers.

And rubber gloves. A change of rubber gloves for each diaper. Goggles too. And those heavy duty respirators to guard against the occasional methane leak. Got to keep OSHA happy.

PETA will want baby wipes. Scented ones. With lanolin. Don't want no bison diaper rash.

This problem will require study. Grants must be granted. Audits of course, cause this all must be transparent. And supervisors. Lots of supervisors.

We will need to hire people to change diapers. Lots of em. Three shifts a day, plus replacement workers on weekends and holidays. Overtime. And a union.

But therein lies the beauty of this. Jobs creation. We'd be creating jobs! Good Democrat voting jobs. And they say the president hasn't created jobs. Well eat your words, you skeptics. Bison diapers is a growth industry.

Funding might be a problem, since this will cost millions, if not billions. We will have to make allowance for this crap in Stimulus Three, or is that Four? There are lots of future generations coming along who will need to pay for this, but they don't vote now. The President isn't concerned; he will be retired on Maui, or maybe Indonesia, years before this chicken comes to roost.

There's a lot of bison poop out there, and it needs to be properly disposed. But who knows more about spreading “bleep” than our federal government?