Mike Pence Might Be a Cigarette Dressed Up as a Person

Tonight is the vice-presidential debate; one issue that might come up—and which would be getting more attention if this were a normal general-election campaign and not an insane nightmare punishment inflicted by pagan gods—is that Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence has some pretty extensive ties to the tobacco industry, which ThinkProgress documents here. A rundown:

• His father was an executive for the “Tobacco Road” chain of gas/cigarette/convenience stores and his brother was later its president; Pence himself owned stock.
• He’s gotten more than $100,000 in political contributions during his career from tobacco companies.
• He voted against the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which passed the House with a large bipartisan majority.
• He wrote, in a 2001 column that was not exactly a masterpiece of empirical reasoning, that “smoking doesn’t kill.”

Most concerning of all? Mike Pence may actually be a cigarette:

Do you see it? I see it. Sinister.