As you may have seen, President Obama cracked a pretty good joke at Mitch McConnell's expense during Saturday's White House Correspondent's Dinner. Despite extending olive branch after olive branch to Congress, he said:
Some folks still don't think I spend enough time with Congress. "Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?" they ask. (Pause.) Really? (Laughter.) Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell? (More laughter.) I'm sorry, I get frustrated sometimes.
And here's McConnell's oh-so-witty reply,
via Twitter:
What, no bourbon for Mr. Turtle? Where's the Kentucky pride?
If that doesn't convince you to want to have a drink with
Mr. Turtle Sen. McConnell, then nothing will. And I'm not just talking about the friendly smile on his face, the ease with which his legs are crossed, or the vicious choke hold that tie has on his neck, I'm also talking about the spectacularly funny reference to Clint Eastwood's empty chair routine.
Clearly, Mitch McConnell is a barrel of laughs. And clearly, he's won the internet. But not just for that—oh no, not just for that. You see, on Friday Sen. McConnell released a new video called The American Ideal. (Ironically, it was produced by a Canadian, but that's just a funny side note.) It's already gotten more than one million views, which is really amazing, especially given how boring the video is.
In fact, as both TPM and the Washington Post note, there's reason to believe the video's viewership might have been artificially inflated. One analytics expert interviewed by the Post said the video's view count didn't appear to be consistent with organic viral growth, suggesting that it instead received traffic thanks to paid sponsorship.
But still, even though the success may have been astroturf, those one million views are real. Sure, maybe it'll turn out that one poor schmuck had to watch that crappy video one million times over, or maybe an army of robots did the work, or maybe it was played to a theater of empty chairs. Who knows. But one million is one million and you can't take that way from him. And that means Mitch McConnell won the internet the Republimerican way: by paying for it.