Jimmy Kimmel is pulling the same old trick Jon Stewart used for years. When discussing a topic like healthcare or gun control, he’s a serious policy wonk. When something comes up that’s inconvenient or embarrassing to Democrats, hey – he’s just a TV host.
That’s basically how Kimmel defended his lack of interest in the Harvey Weinstein scandal during an interview with Good Morning America.
Matt Wilstein writes at the Daily Beast:
Jimmy Kimmel Defends Lack of Harvey Weinstein Jokes: I’m Not the ‘Moral Conscience of America’After he spoke out so forcefully on both health care and gun control over the past month, many late-night viewers might have expected Jimmy Kimmel do the same about the sexual harassment and assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein. When he didn’t, Kimmel’s right-wing critics — including Donald Trump Jr. — were quick to accuse him of liberal bias. Was he protecting the Democratic donor and his fellow “Hollywood elite” in a way he would never do for Donald Trump?Kimmel pushed back hard on those assertions on Friday during an interview with Good Morning America’s Amy Robach to promote his upcoming week of Brooklyn tapings, during which he also welcomed the idea of having President Trump on his show. “Maybe this is crazy, but I feel like I could turn him around on a couple of things,” he said…“First of all, the Harvey Weinstein thing, people like this false equivalence of that’s somehow equivalent to what happened in Las Vegas,” Kimmel added, arguing that the alleged assault of dozens of women does not deserve the same reaction as the killing of nearly 60 people. He said that Weinstein is “not a friend of mine,” adding, “I’m not in the movie business.” As a once and future Oscar host who is friends with many of the movie stars in Weinstein’s orbit, that claim is a hard one to buy.On GMA, Kimmel went on to accuse “gun nuts” of “trying take any comedy bit I did out of context and use it as some kind of proof” that he is not an ally for women, including some pretty gross moments from The Man Show.“They’re saying that I’m calling myself the moral conscience of America, which I most certainly never did and most certainly never would,” he declared.
Watch below. The video is cued to start at the 3:43 mark.
Where did Jimmy Kimmel get the idea that he’s the moral conscience of America, anyway?
Maybe he reads CNN:
How Jimmy Kimmel became America’s conscienceIf, at any earlier time in his career, anyone had suggested to Jimmy Kimmel that people would someday be citing him as the conscience of the nation, he would surely have done the world’s greatest spit-take.But just a couple of weeks after his emotional stand against the latest Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Kimmel is back stage center, this time in the renewed debate about gun control. Kimmel’s impassioned, tearful plea for action on guns after his hometown of Las Vegas was ravaged by a killer wielding an arsenal was the centerpiece of a universal cry of despair that marked the response to the tragedy among late-night television hosts Monday night.And Kimmel is, indeed, being showered in praise by gun control advocates for taking the outspoken stand he did in his opening monologue.Of course, he is being equally assailed by pro-gun advocates on the right for using his entertainment platform to advance views they dismiss as liberal nonsense. If they were going to pummel him on social media for taking a stand after nearly losing his newborn son, they surely weren’t going to allow him a shred of credit for putting his human face on the gun-control debate.
Perhaps Jimmy could do a segment about Weinstein called the War on Women. Oh wait, that’s already been used.
Featured image via YouTube.
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