‘Sorry’ isn’t a word that appears in Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s dictionary. That’s right, she has her own dictionary.

It’s not a brilliant dictionary, admittedly. The only words in it are ‘gun’, ‘Bush’, ‘USA’ and the entire set of lyrics to Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning) by Alan Jackson. But anyway, Elisabeth Hasselbeck doesn’t say sorry very often. Although that’s probably because she doesn’t make jaw-droppingly insensitive remarks insinuating that women who wear revealing clothes deserve to be stalked very often.

But that’s what Elisabeth Hasselbeck did on Tuesday, claiming that the man who was convicted of secretly filming Erin Andrews through a hotel peephole would have seen just as much and avoided jail by watching her on Dancing With The Stars. And now Elisabeth Hasselbeck has apologised to Erin Andrews in the hope that she’ll seem less of a twonk. She doesn’t, by the way.

If you were going to throw together a compilation of Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s greatest hits, you’d have to include the time when she went out and campaigned for Sarah Palin, and the 10-minute split-screen argument she had with Rosie O’Donnell where her voice became so unbearably shrill that it tore a hole in the actual fabric of the universe.

But in retrospect, they’re all just B-sides to Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s greatest moment. Her Bohemian Rhapsody. Her Mona Lisa. Her Everest. That came on Tuesday, when Hasselbeck managed to offend just about every single woman on the planet.

Before we explain any further, you’ll need some context. Last year a video appeared on the internet showing sportscaster Erin Andrews in a hotel room, naked and curling her hair. It transpired that the video had been recorded without her knowledge through a modified peephole. Following this genuinely horrifying invasion of her privacy, the man who recorded the video was sentenced to 30 months in jail on interstate stalking charges, although that hasn’t stop Erin Andrews from receiving a number of subsequent death threats.

Since then, Erin Andrews has appeared on Dancing With The Stars wearing – as is normal for Dancing With The Stars contestants – skimpy outfits. During a discussion of these outfits on Tuesday’s edition of The View, Elisabeth Hasselbeck said:

“I think in light of what happened, and as illegal and as inexcusable as it was for that horrific guy to go in and peep on her in her hotel room, I mean in some way if I’m him I’m like ‘Man! I just could have waited 12 weeks and seen this – a little bit less – without the prison time’.”

That made Erin Andrews release a statement calling Hasselbeck’s comments:

“a slap in the face to victims of stalking and sexual predators. As a mother and a woman, I’m disappointed she went there.”

Which, in turn, made Elisabeth Hasselbeck give a frantic, wet-eyed apology on yesterday’s show…

And now everyone’s friends again. So that’s the moral of this story – don’t wear skimpy outfits and then bitch that people are stalking you. Or – it’s OK to say startlingly inappropriate things about other women if you cry afterwards. Or – Elisabeth Hasselbeck is the world’s biggest wazzock.

We’ll probably just go with the last one if that’s OK with you.

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Hands up who thinks Elisabeth Hasselbeck is full of crap. Well, she is. No, literally, Elisabeth Hasselbeck is full of crap.

She’s got celiac disease, which essentially means that if she eats any gluten she’ll end up uncontrollably pooing all over the place like some sort of awful dirty bomb. We know this because Elisabeth Hasselbeck has written a celiac disease cookbook – a cookbook that another writer claims she copied from her, and she’s suing Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

Which is plainly ridiculous. Of course Elisabeth Hasselbeck didn’t plagiarise anyone else’s work – we’re not even convinced that the woman can even read.

Even God, in all his infinite wisdom, sometimes makes mistakes. Look at Elisabeth Hasselbeck, for example – God happened to make her very pretty. This must have been a mistake, because he seems to have gone out of his way to compensate for it ever since. First he gave her a voice like rape alarm going off in a tumble-dryer, but people still found her attractive. So then he filled her head with a lot of dumbly patriotic nonsense about how brilliant war is. In a final act of desperation he even made her support Sarah Palin, but that didn’t work either.

So he gave her the shits. Mission accomplished, God. Mission accomplished.

Of course, Elisabeth Hasselbeck knows that God didn’t give her celiac disease. The dirty foreigners did, ten years ago during a trip abroad. But that’s by the by. Because Elisabeth Hasselbeck has suffered with celiac disease for a decade, and that’s not a particularly nice thing to happen to anybody.

On the plus side, though, Elisabeth Hasselbeck has been able to pile an entire decade’s worth of experience into her new book The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide, which details her struggle to come to terms with the illness and offers dietary advice to other sufferers. Which sounds a little too similar to a book entitled Living with Celiac Disease for Susan Hassett‘s liking, because Susan Hassett wrote Living With Celiac Disease, sent Elisabeth Hasselbeck a copy of the book last year and is now suing Elisabeth Hasselbeck for plagiarism. The New York Daily News reports:

Hassett says that she sent the talk show host a copy of her self-published book as well as a homemade cooking video, newspaper article, business card and personal note. [Publisher] Center Street issued a statement: “There is no basis for the allegations in the Complaint… Ms. Hasselbeck worked diligently and tirelessly on her book and is disappointed in this attempt to discredit her work and her ability to bring this important message to the public.”

So is Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide illegally similar to Susan Hassett’s Living With Celiac Disease? That’s absolutely not for us to say. But we would like to point out that the cover of The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide shows Elisabeth Hasselbeck standing next to a pile of bread with a face that’s all like “Nuh-UH you yeasty skank!” whereas the cover of Living With Celiac Disease has some rubbish clipart of a stick figure pointing at a star.

What’s our point? Christ knows. Please don’t make us side with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, though. The thought of it freaks us out.

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We don’t know what’s worse – the recession or the thought of Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s terrifyingly fertile uterus.

OK, it’s definitely the uterus thing. Because Elisabeth Hasselbeck from The View is pregnant again. We’ve lost count of how many children Hasselbeck has now, but we think it’s about a million – almost enough to entirely repopulated the planet with billions of tiny shrill indignant right-wing nutsacks.

Apparently Elisabeth Hasselbeck didn’t even realise she was pregnant, putting her stresses down to ‘election fever’. We know the feeling – we once thought we were pregnant, but it was actually just Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s voice giving us tit-ache.

It’s a simple fact that being pregnant makes a woman more right-wing – if you ever knocked a leftie like Susan Sarandon up, within days you’d see her stop weeping about wrongly-incarcerated rapists and start bellowing about tax cuts for the wealthy and trying to kick passing immigrants in the mouth. That’s a given.

So just imagine what being pregnant does to Elisabeth Hasselbeck, The View‘s resident screeching, world-hating Republican. Even when her womb is empty Elisabeth seems to spend the bulk of her time wailing about the immorality of abortion rights for rape victims at such a frighteningly high pitch that she can actually vibrate the skulls of bats until they explode, so now that she’s got pregnant again we think we’re going to spend the next few months cowering in a lead-lined bunker in case she decides that she wants to annex us or something.

Yeah, you heard right. Elisabeth Hasselbeck is pregnant again. Despite only giving birth to her last baby just over a year ago, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and her husband – let’s call him Target Of The World’s Pity Hasselbeck - have gone and done it again.

Only this time it’s different, you see, because there’s a funny anecdote attached to it. Get this, right, Elisabeth Hasselbeck didn’t even realise she was pregnant! She thought she was getting tired and fat and nauseous because of the US election last year! How chronically hilarious. The Boston Herald reports:

“We were thoroughly happy with the surprise of it,” she said. “I didn’t even know for two months!” While attending the inauguration earlier this month, Hasselbeck didn’t feel too well. “I was tired, I was nauseous, I thought I was worn out from the whole procedure,” she went on. “No. I was knocked up and didn’t realize it.”

What an adorable story. We’d like to extend our hearty congratulations to Elisabeth Hasselbeck and her husband – and especially their unborn child who, one day, when it asks its mother and father where it came from, will receive the heartwarming response “You see, sweetheart, me and your daddy had lots of angry hate-sex when we realised that a black Muslim liberal Democrat was going to be president, and then you came out.” Romantic.

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On The View yesterday, bets were on as to exactly when Elisabeth Hasselbeck would spontaneously combust and/or claw wildly at her own face.

Because, judging by her fervent campaigning for the Republican party, Tuesday’s election win for Barack Obama seemed like literally the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to Elisabeth Hasselbeck in her entire life. But on The View yesterday, something strange happened.

On The View yesterday, Elisabeth Hasselbeck gracefully admitted defeat and declared her support for the president-elect. And, thanks to Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s elegant speech, the partisan schisms that threatened to tear America apart were instantly healed. Well, in the parts of America that watch The View, anyway. So the chronically old and unemployed parts that can’t find their remote control to change channel. Isn’t that enough?

Over the last few years, The View has come to symbolise the political gulf in America better than anything else. One one side there’s a screaming fat lesbian, and on the other side there’s a shrieking, blindly-patriotic government sock-puppet, and in the middle are a couple of funny-looking old ladies whose names we’ve never bothered to learn. Perfect.

But recently, as the endless election campaigning slowly built to a crescendo, things on The View got a little bit out of hand. Rosie O’Donnell resigned and Elisabeth Hasselbeck started screeching at such a terrifying pitch and velocity that The View almost sacked her before she caused irreversible structural damage to the Earth’s core.

And so, after Barack Obama won the general election on Tuesday night, speculation was rife over what Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s reaction would be on the following day’s edition of The View. Scientists had narrowed it down to three likely scenarios:

1 - Elisabeth Hasselbeck would throw herself on a Samurai sword after the second commercial break.

2 - Elisabeth Hasselbeck would be punched unconscious by a victory-giddy Joy Behar.

3 - Elisabeth Hasselbeck would try and be gracious in defeat, only to end up choking to death on her own tongue while trying to force the words out.

In fact, none of those things happened. Realising that blindly following the word of the president without question has done alright for her so far, Elisabeth Hasselbeck declared that she’d do exact same thing for Barack Obama. Look, here’s the video…

We’re still a little unconvinced by this sudden turnaround. After all, given Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s froth-mouthed introduction speech for Sarah Palin a fortnight ago, we’re fully expecting that she’ll be announced as Palin’s campaign manager for 2012. If that happens – judging by the past – Hasselbeck will advise Palin to run on the twin messages of ‘screeching like an alarmed dolphin in a fire’ and ‘bug-eyed scuttlebutt’.

But let’s concern ourselves with that later. For now, it’s just nice to see that the civil war that almost ripped The View apart has ended. And that means that we never have to watch another episode so long as any of us live. Wonderful.

At this point, it’s fair to say that we’d let a robot dinosaur Hitler win the election if it meant it could all be finished today.

Because, honestly, we know that it’s an important election and all, but it’s turned everyone into stupid screeching partisan bellends. And Exhibit A would be this – at a Sarah Palin rally in Florida yesterday, people not only let Elisabeth Hasselbeck from The View screech on witlessly about politics for 10 entire minutes, but they also actually clapped her at the end.

It just goes to show how much trouble the Republican campaign is in – it’s clear they just let Elisabeth Hasselbeck shriek her worldview to a crowd so that Sarah Palin would look marginally more intelligent in comparison. Let’s hope it worked, because it’s literally impossible to pander to the lowest common denominator any more than that. Well, unless someone gives Jessica Simpson a call, but who’d want that?

You know what’s naused up this election for us? Famous people. It’s a scientifically-proven fact that at any given moment in time, upwards for 50 celebrities are screaming their newfound political opinions, either on TV or in magazines or on the internet or spinning around in their garden like a toddler on E-numbers. The other day we saw a video of Ron Howard shaving his beard off for Barack Obama and it genuinely made us want to throw ourselves off a bridge.

What we’re trying to say is this – if we wanted to hear the political opinions of a badly-educated jumped-up egotistical nincompoop with epic delusions of grandeur, we’d go and stand in front of a mirror for half an hour.

By and large, celebrity endorsement ahead of the election seems to have fallen on the side of Barack Obama, with many of them even complaining if John McCain uses one of their songs. But now it’s time to turn the tide, and the Republicans have got a mighty trick up their sleeves. She might not be as famous as, say, Matt Damon, but this little lady is 10 times as loud, and pound for pound is about 30 times more of an idiot than just about anyone who’s allowed to go on TV. Ladies and gentlemen, Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

Everyone knows how much of a fierce conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck is, because of the skin-melting velocity in which she bellows about it every single morning on The View. Her opinions are so strong that people are guessing that she’ll either quit The View or die of a horrible aneurysm at some point before the election unless something gives.

Neither will probably happen now, though, because yesterday something gave. For some reason that we don’t think we’ll ever understand, the Republican party yesterday let Elisabeth Hasselbeck introduce Sarah Palin at a rally in Florida. And it was like lancing a boil. A big screeching boil that burst in a frequency that only bats can understand and quite often didn’t really seem to know what it was talking about. Oh, go on then, here’s the video…

Did you manage to get all the way through that? Us neither. After about four minutes it started to make us feel like we were trapped inside a metal cave full of piercing rape alarms and screaming babies and we had to abort.

Still, though, at least we know why everyone else on The View constantly tries to shut Elisabeth Hasselbeck up now. We’ve never felt such gratitude towards Whoopi Goldberg.

Can you imagine The View without Elisabeth Hasselbeck? It’d just be four women babbling topical abuse over the top of each other and- oh wait.

No, that’s what The View is now. Actually, come to think of it, The View would be pretty much identical regardless of whether Elisabeth Hasselbeck was on it or not. But that’s nobody’s concern any more, because Elisabeth Hasselbeck has pledged her future to The View after a few days of on-screen bickering and off-screen uncertainty.

This is undoubtedly a good thing -  Elisabeth Hasselbeck fulfills an important role on The View. No, not as the sole conservative voice on the panel, but as the woman you secretly fancy even though you violently disagree with every single thing she’s ever said in the whole of her life. Who else would fill that role? Whoopi Goldberg? Yeek.

This has to rank as one of the worst weeks of Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s life. First of all Elisabeth’s arch-enemy Rosie O’Donnell got her own primetime TV show on NBC, which Hasselbeck should really take as a personal insult on the scale of having her nose wiped in runny dogmuck.

And then, worse still, Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s future on The View was called into question. As an out and proud Republican a month before a general election, it was reported that Elisabeth was becoming more and more outraged by the way that her co-hosts kept taunting her over her plans to vote for the little old man and his funny little helper woman he keeps hanging around with.

Reportedly things were so bad that some urgent ‘cooling-off’ meetings had to be held to get everyone back in line before Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s voice got so loud and shrill that it completely impaired all dolphins’ ability to receive sonar and sent them all darting off into cruise ship propellers.

But Elisabeth Hasselbeck definitely isn’t leaving The View – and especially not to go and work on Fox News – so she’s got her agent to tell the world. The New York Daily News reports:

“While Elisabeth (Hasselbeck) has a great relationship with Fox News, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that she is leaving “The View,” her agent said in a statement… “An offer was never made,” said an FNC spokesman. “While we love having her as a guest on our air, there is no offer on the table.”

It’s probably for the best that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is sticking with The View, because it’s really the job of a lifetime for her. This is the only job she’ll probably ever have where she’s encouraged to screech about how rape victims shouldn’t get abortions on daytime television. Well, unless she goes for the job as host of the upcoming daytime gameshow Murderer! You Wicked Godless Murderer! but that’s unlikely.

The View is a place for women of differing political viewpoints to intelligently discuss the news of the day while squawking around like a gang of clueless ninnies.

And, as such, all political viewpoints must be represented on The View. That’s why Elisabeth Hasselbeck has gained longterm employment on The View as the show’s resident spiteful backwards reactionary fact-ignoring common sense-deprived world-hating Bible-humping bumbling yokel.

But maybe not for much longer. It’s been reported that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is getting more and more infuriated with the liberal viewpoints of her co-host Whoopi Goldberg, to the extent that ‘cooling-off meetings’ have been arranged to calm her down. It’s led to speculation that Elisabeth Hasselbeck will soon leave The View, which will be a shame. We were hoping she’d stick around at least until her brain popped.

It doesn’t matter what happens on The View any more. The show’s glory days are behind it. Barbara Walters could set fire to some orphans and kick them down the stairs tomorrow and people would still only remember The View for two moments.

Those moments are when Danny DeVito drunkenly burped puke into his own mouth and – more relevantly – the full-scale split-screen windtunnel of a screechy row between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O’Donnell about the war or something. Nobody came out of that one looking good – not least us, but that’s only because it made us so infuriated that we pulled all our hair out and started striking around at our faces with a hammer.

The winner of that particular battle was Elisabeth Hasselbeck, whose argument that all unborn children should be given handguns to protect themselves from abortionists and rapists (or something) beat down Rosie O’Donnell’s assertion that the government is made of a giant super-intelligent lizard race determined to farm the world of its tears (or something). But, by winning the battle, Elisabeth Hasselbeck may have lost the war.

That’s because, after the fight, Rosie O’Donnell left The View and was replaced by Whoopi Goldberg. Now, Whoopi Goldberg is probably as liberal as Rosie was, but it’s harder for Elisabeth Hasselbeck to win fights with her. It’s easy to look like the clever one when your debate opponent is a fat belligerent lesbian, but when it’s the wise, all-knowing Jesus alien from Star Trek: The Next Generation? Not so much.

And because of this, Elisabeth Hasselbeck has reportedly been getting so wound up that she could be on the cusp of leaving The View. The Seattle PI reports:

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the only politically conservative member of the hosting crew on ABC’s “The View,” apparently is becoming more annoyed with her liberal counterparts. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker quotes “a longtime staff member” of the show as saying, “It’s not as bad as during the Rosie era,” but Hasselbeck is “really upset” with the liberal politics of co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.

Because of this, there have apparently been ‘cooling-off meetings’ to try and get everyone back onside. But with an election just weeks away, there’s every chance that Elisabeth Hasselbeck will become so shrill and objectionable that only dogs will be able to tell how much ill-informed nonsense she’s spouting.

So, you know what? Let Elisabeth Hasselbeck leave. She’s apparently already looking over offers from Fox News, and she’ll obviously be happier there. Plus it can’t be that hard for The View to find a replacement who shares the same political ideologies as Elisabeth Hasselbeck, can it? Has anyone even tried calling Ralph Fiennes From Schindler’s List In A Lady’s Wig yet? Thought not.

Fans of very specific, slightly nauseating, lesbian pornography get ready – Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck are going to get it on!

Well, look, OK, Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck obviously aren’t going to get it on at all, but that hasn’t stopped Rosie O’Donnell calling Elisabeth Hasselbeck ‘very attractive’ during an interview with Howard Stern yesterday.

We’ll get to the details in a moment, but for now let’s just mourn the fact that Rosie and Elisabeth aren’t able to genetically create their own child – because it’d have to be part O’Donnell and part Hasselbeck, and we could earn all sorts of money running a book on whether it’d come out fat and intolerant or skinny and paranoid.

Ever since her tenure at The View ended up with a blazing row and nobody wanted her to host The Price Is Right, Rosie O’Donnell has been existing in a diminished capacity lately. She’s given up booze and hung out with Cyndi Lauper a bit, but not a whole lot else. And now we know why.

Because Rosie O’Donnell is too busy daydreaming about her former crackpot right-wing co-host of The View Elisabeth Hasselbeck. So far Rosie’s got the daydream where they’re feeding each other strawberries in a sun-dappled meadow, the daydream where Elisabeth is rescuing Rosie from a burning building to the sound of I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner and the daydream where they’re both covered in oil and going hammer and tongs at each other with gigantic strap-on dildos on a revolving bed in a sex dungeon on a yacht.

It’s true – Rosie O’Donnell has confessed to Howard Stern that the very thought of Elisabeth Hasselbeck screeching on about the evils of abortion in her dreadful rape-alarm voice gets her so horny that she has to go and rub her crotch up and down on the corner of the nearest municipal building before she explodes.

Or, in a more truthful explanation, Howard Stern pestered Rosie O’Donnell on his radio show until she eventually admitted that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is sort of OK-looking for a hateful witch. Access Hollywood reports:

“Wouldn’t it have been the ultimate accomplishment to take this conservative girl and turn her, so to speak?… Were you not attracted to Elisabeth Hasselbeck?” Howard asked. “When you look at her physically, you don’t want her?” “See, the want is the big thing,” Rosie explained. “I find her very attractive. She’s very attractive, I think.” “Her body is perfect,” Stern commented. “Have you ever seen her biceps?” Rosie responded.

See? We knew it! That time Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck had a screaming argument on The View, it was all down to pent-up sexual tension. If there had been any justice, the fight would have ended with Rosie and Elisabeth sweeping the papers off The View‘s desk and making out with each other with tongues on top of it for like half an hour. It would have been like that porno we saw once, Disgusting Mind-Scarring Lesbians That Nobody Finds Sexy At All 4, we think it was called. It was hot.

Anyway, we were just kidding about the fight being down to sexual tension, because that’d mean that Rosie O’Donnell wanted to sleep with everyone she had a feud with. And god knows people have gone mad for less than imagining Rosie having a three-way with Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan.

The feud between Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck was one that not even the most hardcore pervert could have imagined turning sexual.

But that's exactly what has hap… no, we're only joking. Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck aren't fighting any more, but only because Rosie though to send Elisabeth's newborn some gifts.

Still, we had you with the sex thing, right? Right?

The View has always been about disagreements, and it always will be – whether it's a disagreement about how much Danny DeVito has had to drink or about if murdering dogs is really brilliant or just quite brilliant. But no disagreements on The View were ever like the splitscreen battle royale between Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck back in May. 

Founded on their inherent political differences – basically that one is a rightwing lunatic and the other is a paranoid conspiracy theorist – the Rosie O'Donnell/ Elisabeth Hasselbeck televised face-off was so vicious that we think it actually tore a hole in the space/time continuum. It'd explain a lot if it were true.

It would explain why Rosie O'Donnell left The View in a tantrum immediately and subsequently failed to find any other TV work, and it'd also explain why Elisabeth Hasselbeck got knocked up and gave birth to a baby boy pretty soon afterwards, even though we imagine that she thinks sex – even sex within a loving marriage – is filthy and wrong and will send you to hell and is something that only immigrants do.

But, despite keeping a tentative distance from each other since their on-air scrap, now it looks like Rosie and Elisabeth are ready to act like grown-ups around each other again. Apparently Rosie has decided that enough is enough, and that children are the future and that she and Rosie should teach them well and let them lead the way. Rosie's been speaking to People about her new softer relationship with Elisabeth:

"He's very, very cute. I saw him on TV, and I sent him a lovely gift, and [she and Hasselbeck] have been e-mailing each other. And peace prevails… We e-mail back and forth. She seems good. She looks like she adopted, like she didn't give birth. She looks perfectly fit and gorgeous already."

It's almost enough to bring a tear to the eye, isn't it? Not the fact that Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck are slowly becoming friends again – we couldn't give a stuff about that – but we're just overwhelmed to learn that Rosie O'Donnell doesn't speak in that ridiculous blog haiku-speak all the time. Truly, this is a time of goodwill on Earth.

Read more:

Rosie Sends Baby Gifts to Elisabeth Hasselbeck – People 

Ever since Rosie O'Donnell left The View, there's been a hole in Elisabeth Hasselbeck's life – a big, attention-seeking, red-faced hole that won't stop screaming unless you plug it onto the end of a boob.

But now that hole has been filled by Elisabeth Hasselbeck's newborn baby son. Not much was known about Elisabeth Hasselbeck's son – other than that it's going to rebel harder than any other child in history in about 16 years' time – but then Elisabeth Hasselbeck called The View yesterday to reveal all. Apparently Elisabeth Hasselbeck's new baby is called Taylor Thomas Hasselbeck and weighs 7 pounds, 15 ounces. Hasselbeck would have gone into more detail on The View but she cut things short because she knows that the first few days of a child's life are critical for force-feeding it crackpot right-wing patriotic nonsense before it learns how to say "shut up" or put its fingers in its ears.

If you thought there was no reason to watch The View after Rosie O'Donnell literally bellowed herself blind and left the show to pursue her brand-new career of getting constantly rejected as the host of other shows, then there's even less reason to watch it now that Elisabeth Hasselbeck – the berserk, almost comically right-wing superego to Rosie O'Donnell's bawling id – has buggered off on maternity leave.

Understandably you're upset, since that just leaves Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters and a handful of painfully nondescript women to host the world's most influential daytime TV show about a gang of old ladies bickering at each other a lot.

But fear not, because even though Elisabeth Hasselbeck only gave birth to her second baby on Friday, she still made time to call her colleagues and announce the baby boy's name to the world, or at least the portion of the world without a proper job. This is what Elisabeth Hasselbeck said:

"His name is Taylor Thomas Hasselbeck… [I was in labour] forever. I only had to push for about 35 minutes, but I think I was in labour for four or five thousand hours. I delivered him on a treadmill watching president Bush."

Elisabeth Hasselbeck also revealed that she was going to remain on maternity leave until The View resumes after the Christmas break in January. It'll be a busy time for Elisabeth because she'll need to get her energy levels back after the sapping delivery while simultaneously trying to make herself presentable again for her television return and attempting to train baby Taylor Thomas to hold and use a firearm in his tiny infant fingers for when she's next away.

But regular watchers of The View shouldn't worry that Elisabeth Hasselbeck's absence will cause the show to slide into a biased left-wing funk where all that will be discussed is how awful the war is and the progressive social teachings of Wilhelm Liebknecht, because The View is inviting guests with similar political viewpoints to Elisabeth Hasselbeck onto the show until she's back to balance things out. Today, for example, the guest on The View is Bill O'Reilly, followed tomorrow by the ghost of Adolf Hitler, and so forth.