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Jimmy Kimmel Is a Bully
The latest spearhead for the “reasonable” Left’s response to Las Vegas has been found in the heartfelt, but factually false monologues from Jimmy Kimmel. Now, unlike many on the Right, I don’t harbor a dislike of the man himself. He seems a decent fellow and brought one of better libertarian-leaning minds to us, Adam Carolla. I no longer watch Kimmel, or any late-night comedians for that matter, as they continually find joy in insulting me while their barking seal audience lauds their vitriolic approval with enthused applause. Why would anyone want to be attacked before going to sleep by a supposed moral authority?
Back in his youth, Kimmel said he wanted to be David Letterman. For the same reason, I didn’t watch the not-so-funny Letterman at the end of his career either. However, just because we don’t watch him, we still can’t escape his political prolix. His rants are being replayed everywhere. Kimmel is affable and sympathetic, and many of us can envision being friends with him outside of the political debate. But he is currently being a bully. A great big, ignorant bully. In fact, he is the most dangerous kind of bully. Since he elicits empathy from a great number of people, he is elevated as a voice of reason and is now being used by the left to carpet-bomb their enemies, us.
He taps into our raw emotion, confusion, fears, and anger when we are most vulnerable. He sounds moderated in his views and effectively lectures us on his “facts,” which sound like common sense. If you throw out everything you know, whether it’s on healthcare or gun rights, Kimmel seems wise, truthful, and tearful, therefore those who he has determined are on the other side of his “truth” must be ignorant, hateful, and/or evil. I won’t get into numerous details why Kimmel is factually wrong on the gun rights debate, but recommend watching the always thorough Ben Shapiro who covers it here.
Why is Kimmel a bully? Normal people (those of us not screaming at each other on Twitter for hours on end) wake up each day, head to work, take the kids to school and come home exhausted only to rinse and repeat. Every few weeks we come up for air only to remark “how did we get to October already?” Most don’t follow the minute-to-minute outrage machine from both the left and right and correctly consider the incessant anger as cancerous. Also, there are shades of gray. It’s confusing to know what’s what. Yes, CNN may hate Trump, but didn’t Trump say what he said?
Confusion, which many would say is by design, stops most from intellectually understanding the deeper issues. Therefore, emotion trumps truth. Reading an article deep in the interweb why Kimmel is wrong does not get the eyeballs that Kimmel gets when demonstrating his tormented heart on his sleeve. And thus Kimmel has been elevated to be the moral authority on this issue and tells us because we vote for conservatives “your thoughts and prayers are insufficient.” Shapiro asks “who died and made Kimmel God? Who made you the great moral arbiter of our time?”
Many of our families and friends get much of their political marching queues from empathetic entertainers, enlightened late-night “comedians,” and those unbiased “journalists” who make up the mainstream media. When Las Vegas happens, it pierces our protective bubble, which many have fortified against the shrill politics of our day.
None of us can understand how someone could intentionally kill and hurt so many innocents, and as we look for answers, the enlightened ones immediately turn evil into a political “I told you so” moment.
We cringe and think to ourselves, well, that’s just the extremists on the left — those Twitter crazies who spend their days screaming at each other while the rest of us try to make ends meet. For example, within minutes of reports of the Las Vegas massacre, we get teachers vomiting their hatred into the ether. (She since deleted her account) .
Within minutes of the Congressional baseball game shooting, Daily Kos founder (an extreme-left echo chamber) Markos Moulitsas tweeted this response to Rand Paul.
Republicans are getting what they want. https://t.co/8ZUnso6JCV
— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) June 14, 2017
The Pulse Night Club massacre, until Sunday night, the worst mass shooting in the United States, brought out advocates of the LGBTQIAA (did I miss anyone?) community who immediately blamed the right for the evil perpetrated by a “radicalized Muslim lone wolf.” Here was an ACLU Lawyer’s take:
The Christian Right has introduced 200 anti-LGBT bills in the last six months and people blaming Islam for this. No. #PulseNightclub
— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) June 12, 2016
The Left wants to preach empathy. But they will only accept complete submission by their perceived political enemies. As we learn who the Las Vegas killer was and what psychosis propelled him to slaughter so many innocents, the left is once again falling into the trap of assuming they can bully their fellow Americans into acquiescence. It’s a formula that has only lead to the disintegration of national dialogue, balkanize our country and, if it continues, will likely lead to their greatest nightmare of all, the re-election of President Trump.
Published in General
People don’t like being told their beliefs are abhorrent and wrong. They tend to clam up and walk away rather than engage in dialogue. Then they vote their conscience.
Bully indeed and he became unwatchable long ago.
Not sure if this fits here.
I have an acquaintance who is a retired public health nurse. Her last job was with FEMA. An old college friend (Berkeley) has been sending lefty vitriol to her. Yesterday, RN suggested that her friend step away from the computer. Today’s vitriol was worse (and aimed at FEMA). RN has stopped reading Twitter and turns the computer off at 7pm. She is feeling better.
I remember when Jimmy Kimmel was funny. I loved it when he and Adam Corolla encouraged women to support an end to women’s suffrage. That was funny. Sermonizing is not. I think with the weight he lost his sense of humor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_L5YH9Qlr4
Showing my vintage here:
Johnny Carson was great. Leno was mostly OK. I could never stand Letterman.
Jimmy Kimmel was funny as the straight man/question reader on the old Win Ben Stein’s Money show, although his ad libs sometimes went a little too far. But when the brains at the NFL had him begin yakking about football, I found I could not stand the guy.
And that was how many years ago? Now I am happy to have recently cut cable, no Kimmel, no NFL, etc. It’s blissful not to pay cable bills just to be insulted.
(Although I’d have enjoyed being called a hockey puck by Don Rickles).
Kimmel is sad. He’s all wrapped in his self-righteous emotion and is an angry limb of the Left. Let him swat at us all he wants. I hope he does a better job educating his young son than he does the general public.
They keep telling us we are racist, gun-toting, backwood hicks because that will surely turn us into Democrats.
Who’s ignorant here?
I have ‘unfollowed’ a good number of Facebook friends for that reason. Twitter is still good for getting news from trusted sources, but I refuse to engage. And I have a rule, I never open any email with the subject line: FW; FW; FW; FW; FW; FW; FW; FW;
I watched TMS with Jimmy and Adam every week when it was new. Kimmel at his funniest.
You know how you stop a bully? You punch him in the nose.
But the word “bully” is much misused nowadays. My ten year old uses that word for any child that disagrees with her. That seems to be the case here. Jerk? Yes. Liar? Certainly. Bully? No.
By the way, you know the classic bully problem where a group of kids steal something from a kid and toss it back and forth as the hapless victim tries to get it back? I teach my kid that if that happens there is only one response you can use. Consider the object lost. And when the first kid tosses it away as you try to retrieve it you need to punch him in the nose. And keep punching until one of you gets really tired of punching. I bet he won’t do it again, unless he’s psychotic. Don’t use this on the psychotic kid, there’s usually only one of those in a group.
So, we don’t need to be punching any grown ups in the nose. That’s illegal. But we can pick one, freeze him, and make his life miserable for telling such lies. Eh. It’ll never happen.
I didn’t know this was going to be an evergreen image to take slightly more seriously.
More context, please?
The list of groups that want Obamacare and probably the same group that will give us socialized medicine soon enough.
Jimmah moralizing about the wonderfulness of Obamacare. He feels strongly, once again, so he’s right. Shut up already. The Repugs only want you to die quietly.
Emotion is truth; facts are hate.
Then we won’t need to donate to them, right?
“…comedian Jimmy Kimmel raved before attacking Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan… ‘They should be praying,’ he added. …
Kimmel stole Samantha Bee’s act.” — Noah Rothman, October 3, 2017
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/the-definition-of-insanity/
James Lileks
Emotion is truth; facts are hate.
The Babylon Bee reports feelings are now acceptable for math problems:
http://babylonbee.com/news/feelings-now-acceptable-answers-math-problems/
Saw it on Facebook yesterday, but the article is from 2016.
I have said this many many times before but I will say it again. The left is ensuring a Trump victory because they are doing absolutely nothing to get a Trump supporter vote for a democrat. All they are doing is telling other democrats how good and decent they are because they hate Trump. You don’t win elections when you don’t persuade.
If one of the late night shows has a guest who interests me, I will still record it. But I always fast forward through the 20 minutes of Trump bashing that starts the show. It isn’t just that it is vitriolic. It’s simply not funny. Not at all funny. It is nothing but “Trump is stupid! Trump is evil!” over and over and over. I can appreciate humor aimed at my own side. Jon Stewart often displayed an appalling fatuousness about conservative positions, but I think you have to admit – the man was often funny. In the current environment, though, the late night hosts don’t even try to be funny. I suppose they figure, why bother? All they have to do is say “Trump,” and sneer, and the studio audience goes wild. Presumably the lefties watching at home are going equally wild. And the shows have obviously written off the other half of the country. Hell, they should play the National Anthem at the start of their shows, just so they and the studio audience could all kneel during it.
Comedians can either be funny or be politically partisan. They can’t be both.
When they choose to be the latter, they cease to be comedians. That’s what David Letterman did. It’s what Sarah Silverman did (though to be sure, I don’t know if she ever wasn’t politically partisan or ever was funny). That’s what Jimmy Kimmel has done. The list is long. I’ll stop with those three.
I never watched the late-night shows, even when Carson was on. I just could never stay up. I have seen clips of Jimmy Kimmel, though, and his is very talented. Why can’t these people just stick to what they do best, and stop abusing their audience? I will answer it: If you are on the Left, your arrogance convinces you that you know more than most about the world’s problem’s; and your condescension convinces you that most people are just too stupid to know what’s best for them. You’ve got to “enlighten” them.
It’s sad that we now have a generation (or two?) of late night show audiences who expect the “entertainment” to be politicized. No doubt, those in this audience would consider Art Fern, host of the Tea Time Movie (with, hopefully, Carol Wayne) to be low-brow. And, of course, who among today’s hipster-sophisticates would want to see minor talents like Richard Harris or Peter O’Toole interviewed after 8-10 whisky and sodas? Don Rickles? That hater!
But a rant from uber-intellectuals Seth Myers or Jimmy Kimmel? That’s the ticket! Who doesn’t want to relax in bed and doze off to an unfunny monologue about health care or gun control?
Like 2A, Shapiro also dismantled Kimmel’s healthcare sermon. With the Obamacare repeal mess, it’s easy for even us ‘edumacated’ politicos to get confused. Jimmy ensured enough people got erroneous information, thus deflating any chance of the public to support trying to fix Obamacare. Now, folks in CA are opening up their 2018 renewal notices learning they will lose their health plans yet again. Blue Cross/Anthem is pulling out the ACA marketplace.
‘angry limb of the left”. Great line Susan.
Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year: “Post-truth”. It’s defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Or, they could have saved ink and used @JamesLileks 6 words.
How I wish we still had Johnny Carson to bring sense to madness with humor that soothed the soul.
Sabo is the bomb! @6foot2inhighheels …
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jimmy-kimmel-targeted-by-conservative-street-artist-1045951
I’ve seen multiple takedowns of his statement, but this is the first one that addresses him blubbering his way through the whole thing.