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John Oliver Gets Showered In Raisins

by Joseph D. Lyons

More than any election season, the 2016 race seems to be full of scandals. Much of the attention has been on Hillary Clinton's emails and the family's foundations, but on Last Week Tonight Sunday, John Oliver decided to break down just how scandalous the race has been — and there were so many scandals, that Oliver made it rain. Raisins, that is.

That's right. Oliver used raisins to show which candidate has the more scandalous scandals. And guess what. It isn't Clinton. Basically raisins aren't that great except to make this brilliant point. Oliver says, "Ethical failings in a politician are like raisins in a cookie — they shouldn't be there, they disgust people — but most politicians have a few raisins." And while Clinton would be your typical oatmeal raisin cookie, Trump is an endless cascade of dried grapes:

The man is a f**king raisin monsoon. He is ethically compromised to an almost unprecedented degree.

And so at the end of the segment, they literally rained down all over Oliver's desk. The dried fruit comparison is one that Oliver has made before; he's not a big fan. Earlier in the segment, he walked step by step through each candidate's more controversial dealings of the past. Clinton was first, and Oliver acknowledged even saying Clinton and "scandal" in the same sentence could tick some people off:

I do know that even talking about her scandals will irritate some of you, given that her opponent is an unambiguously racist scarecrow stuffed with scrunched-up copies of Juggs magazine, and that's fair.

But he argued that she should still need to pass a level of muster higher than the one Trump has set — "not being as bad as Donald Trump is a low bar." That's fair. He went on to talk about her emails, the Clinton Foundation donations, Benghazi, and Whitewater. But none of these "scandals" upset Oliver to a large degree. They "look bad, but the harder you look, the less you actually find," he said.

Then, it was time to compare her to "Donald Trump, America's wealthiest hemorrhoid." In Oliver's opinion, at least, "He's quantifiably worse." He started things off by noting that Politifact puts Clinton's false statements at just 13 percent, whereas Trump's are 53 percent. His true or mostly true statements are just 15 percent of what he says, according to the site.

From there, it was Trump's taxes, which of course he won't release, even though every other major candidate since the 1980 election has. Trump has repeatedly given the argument that he's being audited as an excuse for not releasing them. The IRS though, disagrees. Trump totally can, and so Oliver isn't buying it:

The IRS has explicitly said you don't need to wait for a completed audit to release them. You're just saying two completely unrelated things. "Oh, I'd love to pick you up from the airport, but I can't because a blue whale's ton weighs as much as an elephant."

He then swears and asks what is going on. "Those things have nothing to do with each other," he yells into the camera before moving on to the next scandal: Trump's business dealings around the world, which he may or may not put into a blind trust when reaching office. But that could be because Trump doesn't understand the meaning of "blind" — he keeps insisting that his children can run the company, which would obviously keep an immediate tie between him and his company.

Then there's the Trump non-profit. "If the financial actions of the Clinton Foundation annoy you, let me introduce you to the Trump Foundation," Oliver said. Recent investigations by The Washington Post show that Trump allegedly used $258,000 of the group's donations to help his for-profit business. The Trump campaign accused the investigation of being "peppered with inaccuracies and omissions."

All in all, Oliver comes down clearly on Clinton's side, at least when it comes to scandals. "The thing is, we have barely scratched the surface of [Trump's] scandals," Oliver said. "This campaign has been dominated by scandals, but it is dangerous to think there is an equal number on both sides. You can be irritated by some of Hillary's — that is understandable — but you should then be f**king outraged by Trump's."

That's definitely something to consider as we head to the first debates.

Images: Last Week Tonight/HBO