We spent a very pleasant Sunday devouring Al Franken’s new book, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. In it, Al Franken explains how he took Al Franken hostage to run for Senate, only to discover that Al Franken was in his heart all along. If you’ve been missing Al Franken, it turns out Al Franken never went away.

There’s a callback to his previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which prompted us to relive the bygone days of 2003, when it was first published. And while wallowing in the nostalgia of John Ashcroft being a public figure, we stumbled across this passage:

“Those early months were heady days for George W. Bush. Emboldened by his landslide victory, Bush passed a $1.6 trillion tax cut which went primarily to the rich, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, delayed rules that would reduce acceptable levels of arsenic in the drinking water, and implemented the enormously successful Operation Ignore.”

You might forgive us for wondering whether we’ve been actually waking up to Sonny & Cher the past five months.

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We’re more than happy to join the national pearl-clutching over Donald Trump’s remarks that he won’t necessarily concede the election if he loses.

But we also happen to think that it won’t make the slightest difference.

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On behalf of the dwindling tribe of rational beings in These United States, we would like to thank Donald Trump for being utterly incompetent.

Trump’s gift for making subtext text — for putting into words what other politicians encoded in dog whistles — revealed what everyone has known, or should have known, since 1980: Conservative politics is total bullshit, an intellectual veneer riding atop an ugly racist engine.

Whatever merit was to be found in conservative “ideas” was totally irrelevant, since without the power of Angry White Voters resentful of Welfare Queens and fearful of Black Murderers, those ideas would never have gained or maintained currency.

And should that bigotry wear thin in a given election, you could always turn to faggots instead to incite an electorally remunerative moral panic.

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Donald Trump is a bad person. You are a bad person for supporting him. Donald Trump said something stupid today. Here is Donald Trump saying something stupid. Here is Donald Trump saying something stupid that makes him sound like a bad movie villain. Here is a video showing Donald Trump saying something stupid, with cuts to the bad movie villain, and music from a recent horror movie, and text I’ve added in case you missed the point.

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• We Won’t Frighten the Shit Out of You
• A Slightly Less Abrupt Dystopian Future
• Mailbox Full

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And the winner is…

Wait. Not Newt? Darn.

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• Don Rickles unavailable to ghostwrite insults.
• Wife refuses to rehearse Adoring Gaze for when I’m caught with exotic Eastern European hooker.
• Satanic coven won’t release me from Vows.

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