I can’t keep track of what is and isn’t supposed to be funny in the whole Blankenship/McConnell saga. I *thought* Blankenship’s original “Cocaine Mitch” coinage was meant to be funny, if in service to a semi-serious point. McConnell’s “Narcos” parody the day after the election was definitely meant to be funny. This ad, though, insists that cocaine is no laughing matter — except that the photo montages of McConnell with lines of coke and rolled-up dollar bills are comically ridiculous and themselves really funny, so much so that they must be deliberate. We’re four or five layers of irony deep here.

What if Don Blankenship’s robotic monotone actually conceals one of the finer comic sensibilities in modern American politics?

“Wait, why is he still running ads? Didn’t he lose the Senate primary last week?” you ask. He did! But trying to win a Senate seat was merely phase one of his campaign. Phase two is revenge on his political enemies. It’s already begun.