Radio host Rush Limbaugh took aim at ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel on Monday after the latter framed left-wing politics as a sign of intelligence.
The star of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” made waves in political circles over the weekend by telling a Los Angeles crowd that late-night television “requires a measure of intelligence” that attracts liberal men like Jon Stewart and David Letterman.
Mr. Limbaugh, whose show boasts roughly 25 million cumulative listeners each week, mocked Mr. Kimmel as an “idiot” who “doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”
“Kimmel is a funny guy, but he’s an idiot,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “He really is an ignoramus. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He’s one of these guys that doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and thinks he knows everything because he’s got a pipeline to ’Chuck You’ Schumer’s office when it comes to health care.”
Mr. Kimmel has drawn the ire of conservatives for his attempts to speak as an authority figure on health care reform, his regular attacks on President Trump, and a skit that uses an ugly puppet of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.
“Maybe the good thing about now having 100 different channels and 30 different talk shows is you can be honest and you can talk about these things and these things that mean something to you,” Mr. Kimmel said Saturday during a live podcast called “Pod Save America” at the Dolby Theatre. “And it also just so happens that pretty much every late-night talk show host is a liberal, and that’s because it requires a measure of intelligence. Not a ton, not a tremendous amount of intelligence, but you do have to be over the baseline.”
Mr. Limbaugh asserted that hiring practices — not an intellectual baseline that would exclude conservatives — is the reason why so many liberals show up on key television networks.
“The idea that the reason that there aren’t any conservative late-night TV talk show hosts is that they don’t have enough intelligent ones, that’s not the answer,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “The people that do the hiring for these positions are not going to hire, wouldn’t dare hire a conservative. Can you see me being hired to do the CBS Evening News? Oh, if they wanted ratings, but they would never live it down if they tried. Well, they wouldn’t do it anyway.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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