... but as I said before I didn't see any winners...
I largely agree with this too. Republicans/Trump certainly won this round, but it is a three week reprieve, and not a long-term win like, say, the Gorsuch appointment or Trump's tax reform legislation. But in 3 weeks it could be. I'm optimistic the Democrats will be more timid about another shutdown in 3 weeks.
I disagree about Ingraham and Kimmel. I'd agree that Ingraham is firmly on the right, but she has been a strident critic of Republican failures. She condemned the GOP for not being able to defeat Obama in 2012, basically saying that if Romney could not defeat an incumbent Democrat with as disastrous a record as Obama's, the Republican party "might as well fold up the tent" and dissolve the party. She was especially critical of Romney political advisers who tried to blame his loss on someone else. More recently, she has been very critical of establishment Republicans who won't support, and even undermine, Trump's nationalist/populist/economic agenda, specifically Republicans like John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Lindsey Graham. She is not a robotic supporter of whatever the GOP is selling, but of more conservative positions that best serve the nation and its people. And she can be quite funny. Likewise Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly (when he was on Fox), Beck (likewise when he was on his game) Carlson and Hannity. That's part of their appeal, that they entertain and make you laugh, even as they discuss serious issues. Hannity had an editorial a few nights ago calling CNN
"the sh**hole network", for their fondness for using the term, literally hundreds of times in a single day on CNN.
Kimmel lately has been a bit weepy and preachy, and even comedian pundits I agree with who do this (even though I agree on the issues) repulse me. Their job is comendy, not angry commentary.
As I said, when Johnny Carson and Jay Leno addressed political issues, they did it in a way that you could be of either ideological side, and still laugh, still find it funny, because it was not angrily tethered to the Democrat side. But over the last 10 years or so late-night "comedy" has become a lot less funny, even as it has clearly aligned to the Democrat side. As in the examples of Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Steven Colbert, David Lettermen, and the aforementioned Jimmy Kimmel.
There are times where comedians like Greg Gutfeld and Dennis Miller have done angry rants that weren't funny as well. But in their cases, unlike the liberal comedians, they do a lot better overall job of reigning their excesses in and just keeping it funny, without coming across as angry and pushing one party.
