The Slatest

Today in Conservative Media: Shut Up, Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel at Clayton Kershaw’s 5th Annual Ping Pong 4 Purpose Celebrity Tournament at Dodger Stadium on July 27, 2017 in Los Angeles, California.

Getty Images for Kershaw’s Challenge

A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.

Conservatives weren’t happy about Jimmy Kimmel’s Tuesday night monologue criticizing Graham-Cassidy, in which the late-night host said, “Bill Cassidy lied right to my face about healthcare.” National Review’s Theodore Kupfer wrote that Kimmel is unqualified to offer commentary on the subject:

Cassidy and Graham’s bill fails the Jimmy Kimmel test, at least according to its namesake. Kimmel labeled Cassidy, who appeared on Kimmel’s show months ago to applause, a liar. Perhaps it was a mistake for a senator to arrogate rhetorical supremacy to a comedian, but Cassidy, for his part, has since pushed back. “I am sorry he does not understand,” Cassidy said today on CNN. “There will be more people covered under the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson amendment than under the status quo,” he said later on MSNBC, explaining that his bill requires “coverage” of pre-existing conditions “to be ‘adequate and affordable.’”

What to do about the health-care system is a complicated question. Kimmel has elected to probe the empirical matter of whether this bill does quite enough to erect a safety net for people with pre-existing conditions. There are legitimate critiques of Graham-Cassidy on those grounds, but at the same time, rhetoric about those with pre-existing conditions, or about the costs of reforming our current health-care system, tends toward exaggeration. And with the leeway Graham-Cassidy’s New Federalist framework would afford them, states might be able to find more efficacious ways to protect those people. The collective decision to elevate Kimmel to status as a leading bioethicist and policy wonk reduces a tricky debate to a single talking point.

“Fact is that Kimmel is a fan of the status quo,” the Federalist’s David Harsanyi wrote, “and he wants you to call Cassidy to complain about it. It’s a shame that Kimmel didn’t provide a number to call for the tens of millions of Americans who have seen their premiums and out-of-pocket costs skyrocket under Obamacare’s strictures. Is there no telephone number for those who are sick of being in exchanges that coerce them to buy plans they don’t need sold to them by companies they don’t like in fabricated non-competitive markets that have dwindling choices?”

Other conservatives took to Twitter to slam Kimmel:

In other news:

Fox News ran a brief segment about a youth football team in Illinois that kneeled during the national anthem at a game for a Colin Kaepernick–inspired protest. From Fox News Insider:

Every player on the 8-and-under Cahokia Quarterback Club football team took part in the protest before Sunday’s game in Belleville.

“One of the kids asked me if I saw [people] protesting and rioting in St. Louis,” Coach Orlando Gooden told Fox 2. “I said yes. I said, ‘Do you know why they are doing it?’”

Coach Gooden said the player responded, “Because black people are getting killed and nobody’s going to jail.” …

After explaining that Kaepernick chose to kneel during the national anthem of NFL games last season to protest police brutality and racial inequality, Gooden said one of the kids asked if they could “do that.”

He said as long as they knew why they were kneeling, he didn’t have any problem with it.

“[W]hile Gooden tries to shift the burden of the decision on the kids, it’s clear that he led them to see Kaepernick’s protest of the country as a positive response to a perceived injustice,” the Daily Wire’s Aaron Bandler wrote. “They might have asked if they could do it, but he clearly deliberately planted the idea.”