Having spoken out so forcefully on both health care and gun control over the past month - seemingly quickly capable of signaling his virtue against President Trump at any headline - many viewers might have expected Jimmy Kimmel do the same about the sexual harassment and assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein... but (perhaps unsurprisingly to many) he has not.
Donald Trump Jr. noticed...
Thoughts on Harvey Weinstein? #askingforafriend https://t.co/iyHhvrlDXO
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 7, 2017
To which Kimmel responded...
“Well, he’s an idiot. This is an imbecile whose job seems to be tweeting, as far as I can tell."
And then attempted to defend his lack of coverage of the massive liberal donor"s disgusting actions (via TheDailyBeast.com)...
“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.
“And I"ll add that that story came out like I think moments before we went to tape on Thursday and we didn"t have a show on Friday,” Kimmel continued.
While The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah managed to work a throwaway joke about Weinstein into his Thursday night show last week, Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon and James Corden all did not cover it until Monday. John Oliver was the first host to fully address it Sunday night.
But even when Kimmel did finally talk about Weinstein on Monday, he used the story more as a tool to go after Trump Jr. than anything else.
“Next time you’re defending your father and you think it’s a good idea to draw a comparison between him and a freshly accused sexual predator, don’t. It doesn’t help,” Kimmel told him, before delivering one joke about Weinstein just to prove that he could.
“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.
Kimmel is probably telling the truth when he says he never set out to become the “moral conscience of America,” but it appears that when it"s possible to lay his comedic hammer down on anything trump-related, "morals" and "conscience" are quickly forgotten (and sexual assault allegations are beyond the realm of discussion... unless they are about Trump).
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