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John Oliver Is Back & Just In Time For The Debates

by Noor Al-Sibai

It may only have been a month-long break, but fans were already sweating while waiting for new episodes of Last Week Tonight. Luckily, John Oliver is back just in time for debate season, and he was in rare form on Sunday night's return.

In pure Oliver fashion, the former Daily Show correspondent expertly covered everything from the protests in Charlotte following the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott to the downfall of Wells Fargo, but it was his comparison of the way media covers the scandals that surround Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that truly showed just how brilliant he really is. In one incredible moment, he actually made up a "Swiss wire transfer" scandal to illustrate that if you pretend to have "evidence" of a Clinton controversy, people will "kind of remember it," even if it's completely fabricated. He went on to point out that, in comparison, the scandals that have dogged Trump throughout his career make Clinton look like an angel.

In his discussion of the differences between Clinton and Trump, Oliver didn't mince words — he asserted that Trump is "quantifiably worse" than Clinton due to a laundry list of scandals that seem stranger than fiction when added up. I don't know about you, but I'd love to see him moderate a debate between the two of them. If nothing else, it'd be freaking hilarious.

Having cut his teeth on The Daily Show, Oliver learned from the best how to mix humor and news to accurately capture the tone of any given news story. With the impossibly high stakes of this election, America needs Oliver now more than ever. We need to be reminded that yes, the Clintons have skeletons in their closets, but that the Clinton closet is a pretty standard walk-in while Trump's is basically a series of catacombs underneath Trump tower. We need to be reminded that nearly everything about this election is both hilarious and worthy of scrutiny, and that behind every story about how crappy Wells Fargo is, there's a joke about an 8-year-old Ron Howard in there, too. After a month without Oliver, America's gotten its British-accented conscience back just in time for the thrilling climax of the too-long action-drama-comedy that is the 2016 election.