TV Wasteland

Late-night TV has become a vast wasteland of chat shows vying to become relevant. The likes of Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Steven Colbert continue to try to appeal to their audience of, mostly younger urban liberals. A flash in the pan, Hobbit from Britain, James Corden, vacated his late-night post when viewers tired of his schtick. He should have stuck with carpool karaoke and stopped talking. There’s nothing quite like a foreigner haranguing Americans about their politics. And we have the recent entry Gutfeld supposedly appealing to Conservatives but, like his brethren lacking to a large extent in my estimation relevance and decorum. Steven Colbert who somehow suspects that he will appear brighter if he uses the French pronunciation of his surname.  Roi des cons. Jimmy Fallon is perhaps the most natural entertainer of the lot, but he, too, has become mired in a race to the left. He rarely misses an opportunity for cheap shots at Conservatives in his monologues while taking a pass on obvious opportunities to poke fun at Progressives despite Biden practically writing the jokes for him. But the surly Jimmy Kimmel, an abrasive native New Yorker, recently went on a rant about his favorite topic, Donald Trump. Referring to Trump’s appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Kimmel called it “ an embarrassing interview.” He specifically referenced Trump stating the following: “Nobody talks about nuclear, the problem we have, the biggest problem we have in the whole world, it’s not global warming, it’s nuclear warming.” Taken out of context, it appears to be a typical Trump stream of consciousness when he often ineloquently fleshes out an idea towards what best can be described as a  tendency toward the verbose. Kimmel naturally seized on it, declaring, “What is this batty old man talking about?” As Yahoo News reported it, he went in to describe how he did an internet search and found no reference to nuclear warming. “The reason nobody’s talking about nuclear warning is that’s not a thing,” he concluded. “It did make one thing clear: that Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid person.”  Nice. So let me get this straight, Jimmy: because you were unable to follow his train of thought, disagreed with his claim that “ nuclear” is a bigger threat than climate change, and rather than give it some thought, you dismissed his hypothesis because you couldn’t find a specific reference in a google search, and that makes Trump the idiot?  I beg to differ. If you bothered to pay any attention to the interview, you would have surmised that, although “nuclear warming” may not be a “thing,” Trump was making the point that Putin has been rather free and loose with suggesting that tactical nuclear weapons are not off the table in Ukraine. So whether you take that as world leaders “warming” to the idea of using nuclear weapons, and North Korea has been at it as well, or take it as a reference to the heat generated by a nuclear blast, despite the fact that a nuclear winter would most likely be the result, any thinking person would surmise that Trump was expressing concern that the world is at risk for nuclear confrontation with the result far more damaging than climate change. Not that difficult to comprehend. So might I suggest that these late-night comedians set aside their self-anointed roles as experts in international affairs and political science and return to making an attempt at entertaining us? Thus far, they are failing miserably.

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