CAIRO (The Borowitz Report – In what it is calling a mission to support a fledgling democracy in the Middle East, the United States this week sent an emergency shipment of negative ads to Cairo.

Explaining the secret mission, a State Department official said that with its first democratic elections getting underway, “Egypt had no access to the mother’s milk of any working democracy: vicious campaign ads full of lies and distortions.”

Starting at dawn on Sunday, U.S. Army paratroopers descended on the Middle Eastern nation armed with pamphlets, flyers, and DVDs of TV ads full of libelous falsehoods about Egypt’s presidential candidates.

Harland Dorrinson, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for the Middle East, said teaching Egyptian politicians the basics of character assassination was “an important first step” in supporting democracy in Egypt, but stressed that “much work still needs to be done.”

“Right now, there’s no apparatus for major companies to funnel billions of dollars directly to political campaigns,” he said.  “Until corporations have total control over the outcome of elections, we won’t be able to say that Egypt has a functioning democracy like ours.”

But Mr. Dorrinson remained upbeat, saying he has seen early signs that democracy may be taking hold in Egypt: “Already, they’re calling one of the presidential candidates a Muslim.”

Elsewhere, a new study shows that congressmen speak English at a 10^th grade level, which means that the U.S. is being governed by children who were left behind.  Get a free subscription to the Borowitz Report here.