He's known as the 'Grim Reaper' of progressive legislation and once filibustered his own bill when Democrats agreed to support it.
Yesterday's first card in Am I Dead? was Mitch McConnell, which, given everything going on right now, felt like a genuinely unfair way to start a morning.
And before anyone asks: no, we didn't do that on purpose. Nobody sat in a room and decided today was the day. The game builds itself — the puzzles are generated automatically, the order is random, and a machine that has no idea what's in the news pulled Mitch McConnell to the top of the deck entirely on its own. I want to be clear that this makes it funnier. The universe was aligning, and it chose violence.
For those who haven't been following: there's a whole thing happening where a chunk of the internet is convinced the Senator has been dead for about a month and his office is just... handling it. I'm not going to pretend I have an opinion on that. But I will say, hand on heart, I clicked "Alive" and felt a small, unfamiliar flicker of "am I sure about this?" — which is not a feeling this game is supposed to give you before you've had coffee. This is a game about Sean Connery. It is not supposed to be current events.
Someone on the leaderboard even changed their username to register their displeasure, and honestly, fair. I laughed out loud, alone, at my desk, which is a thing I do not do for most usernames. I've seen a lot of usernames. This is the first one that felt like it was arguing with me personally.
Here's the thing: we go by the public record, and the public record says he's alive. That's it, that's the whole methodology. We don't have a setting for "alive, but people have concerns." I checked. It's not in there.
So, official statement from Am I Dead?: he's alive, we said alive, we're sticking with alive, right up until the public record says otherwise. If his office wants to make this easier on everyone, a phone call clearing things up would be genuinely, sincerely appreciated. We will not even make it weird. We'll just quietly update our records and move on with our lives.
I'll admit there's something a little unsettling about all this - a game literally called "Am I Dead?" running headfirst into a real-life version of exactly that question. That is not a coincidence we planned for. When we first cooked this thing up, the whole appeal was that it's a simple yes-or-no: alive, or not. We did not expect the yes-or-no to ever get this complicated.
Until then: go play today's puzzle. And tell us if the game ever leaves you as unsettled as this one left me.