John Oliver dedicated his weekly evisceration on Sunday to the most pressing issue currently facing our nation: the looming presidential election. However, instead of focusing on the usual Donald Trump-related absurdities, Oliver took a broader look at the country's entire election process, a.k.a. the "erratic clusterfuck" that comes around every four years to terrorize us all.
This year's primary and caucus process, astutely summarized by Oliver as the "electoral foreplay we've been partaking in since February," has inspired a wave of controversy among those concerned that the sheer difficulty of that process deters or even obscures participation. According to Oliver, at least some of those fears may be well-founded.
"Any competition should have clear rules," Oliver said. "You don't get to the end of a football game and say, 'OK, who found the most eggs?'" But the rules regarding primaries and caucuses, as anyone who's ever participated in them can surely attest, vary greatly from state to state. "There's no clearer piece of evidence that our system is broken—no more thoroughly dead canary in the coal mine—than when Donald Trump is actually making sense," Oliver said, referencing the presumptive Republican nominee's criticism of Louisiana after losing delegates to former rival Ted Cruz.
To battle the pains of this ongoing clusterfuck, Oliver has a solution. Noting that Americans are "destined to live through the same nightmare scenario over and over again until the end of fucking time" unless immediate action is taken, Oliver suggested that everyone who's not really feeling the electoral process start writing letters to party leaders on Feb. 2, 2017. That date, of course, is (fittingly enough) Groundhog Day.
Grab your pens and start scribbling. The future of the American political process may very well be in your hands.
