Ted Cruz Fired Back At ‘Obsessed’ Jimmy Kimmel With A ‘Jeopardy!’ Meme While Still Insisting, ‘I Kicked His Ass At Basketball’

Ted Cruz and Jimmy Kimmel clearly aren’t fans of each other. Their ongoing feud got weird(er) this week when Kimmel asked people to tweet a photoshopped nightmare of a naked dude riding a hot dog with Cruz’s face attached. Yes, everyone involved here is being over the top and tasteless and everything else. That still doesn’t change the fact that Ted won’t stop diverting from the issue that Kimmel brought up this week — when he called Ted a “scumbag” — which was that Ted and several other republicans are trying to “scare old people” by vilifying Dr. Fauci. As of Wednesday, Ted believed that it was more important to highlight a video of “Me kicking his ass at hoops.”

So sure, the #HotDogTeddy thing is an immature response to an immature response, but Ted’s response doesn’t make this feud any more mature. Yes, he brought up hoops again while tweeting, “So, ever since I kicked his ass at basketball, @JimmyKimmelLive has been kinda… obsessed. Last night, he put out a really creepy fake picture of me–naked–riding (his?) hot dog.” Then he added a Jeopardy! GIF that showed recent champ Matt Amodio with his “He’s Just Not That Into You” answer.

Ted is both basketball-obsessed and obsessed with continuing this feud (while also accusing Kimmel of being obsessed), and yeah, Matt Amodio never asked for any of this. His own driving-people-nuts answering habit doesn’t compare at all to what’s going on with a sitting senator who really wants the attention of a late night host. On Kimmel’s end, he’s continuing the feud for entertainment purposes (and that’s no defense for the hot-dog ‘shop job), yet that doesn’t erase how Ted won’t talk about the political tactics that Kimmel was initially critiquing.

Instead, it’s strangely all about basketball for Ted. And that’s how it’s always been, ever since Cruz elbowed court-clerk colleagues while shouting “my bad!” Ted Cruz thinks he’s a basketball stud, but he’s more theatrical than anything else.