‘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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Octomom Nadya Suleman has come in for a lot of stick since giving birth to all those children last year.

And it’s unfair. Just because she convinced a doctor to fill her with so many embryos that throughout her pregnancy you could hear them all screaming in terror like people trapped in a burning skyscraper every time she so much as bent over, it doesn’t mean that Nadya Suleman isn’t normal. And yesterday she appeared on The View to prove how normal she is.

That said, what Nadya Suleman actually did was babble and yelp and squeak and wail and contradict herself several times within the space of the same breath and show everyone what she looks like in swimwear and generally make Whoopi Goldberg pull a face like she was being forced to watch a video of graphic animal cruelty. Job done, then.

Now that Kate Gosselin‘s out of the picture – or at least obscured from general view by anything up to 17 indescribably terrible simultaneous haircuts – Octomom Nadya Suleman has a clear shot at becoming the world’s best-known mother of an irresponsibly large amount of children. This is her time to shine, at least until all the Duggar kids are old enough to verbalise their weird beliefs.

But that in itself poses a problem. How can Nadya Suleman maximise on this opportunity? After all, she’s already toyed with the idea of porn and attempted to sell a video of her giving birth and vocally declared that her babies were a mistake and caused her doctor to be investigated on a charge of gross negligence. Where could she possibly go from here?

Well, there’s always The View. Somehow, The View always brings out the worst in people. It reduced Danny DeVito to a dribbling mess. It caused Rosie O’Donnell to embark on a long, show, horribly public breakdown of sorts. It even made lovely Whoopi Goldberg briefly advocate dog murder. What causes all this madness? Elisabeth Hasselbeck, probably. So, with this in mind, what did Octomom do on The View? Funny you should ask – she did this:

Now, for those of you who don’t have audio, here’s a rough transcript of what Nadya Suleman actually said in this video:

“I’m so energetic! I’m so energe… and I’m writing! And I didn’t realise what kind of an enormous… yeah, my energy levWHUHA! It’s called DNA! IT’S CALLED DNA! And my mom’s in her seventies and she has more just as much energy as I do. I don’t wanna be like that WHUHAHAHA! … Someone told me I need a laugh coach aHAHA! I didn’t answer your questiAHAHA!”

It goes on for three entire minutes after that, too, but it sort of descends into a kind of interminable high-pitched squeal that refuses to ever stop. What’s the moral of this story? How about we tell you after our ears have stopped bleeding.

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Everyone knows that letting Adam Lambert be on TV is an act of gross stupidity. What if he kisses a man?

What if he starts humping your leg? What if he mimes a rimjob in such disgusting detail that it causes everyone to splutter into their tea and have a seizure? Adam Lambert is a risk. But the people of The View don’t care about risks, which is why Adam Lambert appeared on the show yesterday. And, perhaps because the sight of wizened old Barbara Walters is enough to sap the sex out of any situation, Adam managed to behave himself.

That said, during his interview Adam Lambert did keep referring to how ABC had pulled him off. The dirty bugger.

We’re pleased to announce that the war is finally over. After banning him from Good Morning America, Jimmy Kimmel Live and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, ABC has finally lifted its ban on Adam Lambert. True, Adam Lambert might have caused outrage at the American Music Awards by trying to push his tongue so far down his keyboardist’s throat that we thought he was trying to fish out a semi-digested HobNob out of his small intestine, but ABC knows that time – plus the growing sensation that it might be starting to look like someone’s reactionary old uncle – is a great healer.

And that’s why Adam Lambert was allowed on The View yesterday. It was a potentially dangerous situation – it was risky letting Adam appear on a show presented by four obviously gay men, for starters – but any danger was removed by the act of taping the interview prior to transmission. So, while the interview may have contained moments where Adam Lambert shoved a ball-gag into a cameraman’s mouth, or gave a producer the teabagging of his life, or performed an impromptu version of Don’t Rain On My Parade in a bikini made of flamingo feathers, it was all edited out.

And what remained was a lovely chat designed to show America what a lovely boy Adam Lambert can be when he’s not trying to gouge your eye out with his nutsack. EW reports:

When Lambert came out, he said with a laugh, “Protect your children, people!”… While he acknowledged that his AMA appearance was “a little bit lewd” and that he was “experimenting with imagery and performance style,” he admitted that in the future, he’d probably “stay more consistent to the rehearsal” of any TV performance.

From Adam Lambert’s point of view, his appearance couldn’t have gone any better. He didn’t back down or apologise, he seemed to win the majority of the audience over and Elisabeth Hasselbeck didn’t even try to stab him in the throat with a pen for being a Godless sodomite once. That alone is quite impressive. We heard that she’s killed for less.

Actually we haven’t heard that at all, but she’s just got that look about her, hasn’t she?

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Adam Lambert has had an awful couple of weeks – ABC had banned him, and he was starved of publicity as a result.

Except that’s not quite how it worked. In fact, being banned from Good Morning America and Jimmy Kimmel Live and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve ended up making Adam Lambert even more famous than ever. And since its plan to destroy Adam Lambert backfired so spectacularly, ABC is now seeking revenge. The worst revenge that it could ever take on anybody.

That’s right – Adam Lambert has been invited to appear on The View. Pray for his soul, readers, for he hasn’t done anything to deserve this.

Forget Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Forget the Berlin wall coming down. This, truly, is the greatest day for equality in all of history. That’s right – Adam Lambert is going to appear on a mediocre daytime TV show hosted by a gang of awful screeching women. Take that, bigots!

Oh, the road that Adam Lambert has walked to get to this point. After kissing a man in the face at the American Music Awards a few weeks ago, Adam Lambert was cast out into the television wilderness. Good Morning America banned him. Jimmy Kimmel Live and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve banned him. The Early Show didn’t ban him, but it did blur out the offending kiss in case the sight of it suddenly turned everyone quite gay.

This wasn’t just a vendetta against Adam Lambert. This was a vendetta against all men who’ve come second in talent shows and then mimed oral sex on a man during a song about S&M on a live television awards show. And, deep down, isn’t that all of us?

However, it turns out that ABC looks like the bad guy here. By banning Adam Lambert from all of its shows, ABC was exposing itself to accusations of homophobia, and that’d never do – after all, ABC broadcasts Desperate Housewives, a TV show starring Teri Hatcher, Eva Longoria and two other gay men. Banning Adam Lambert was doing the network’s public image no good at all. So a compromise has been reached – Adam Lambert will appear on The View on Thursday. The Washington Post reports:

Lambert is scheduled to sing on the network’s daytime yakker “The View” on Thursday. That’s the day after Lambert talks with Babs Walters on ABC’S “10 Most Fascinating People of 2009.” Only, unlike three other planned Lambert performances that ABC has canceled in recent days, this week’s performance was taped in advance. This gives ABC time to surgically remove any naughty bits.

Taping Adam Lambert’s appearance in advance is an extremely smart move – not only will it filter out any of Adam’s risque moments, but it’ll also give ABC the chance to edit out the bit where Adam Lambert gets too close to Elisabeth Hasselbeck and her head starts involuntarily spinning around and spitting acid everywhere. Everyone’s a winner.

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Now you might look at that headline, with all its exclamation marks and arbitrary capitalisation, and detect a hint of sarcasm.

But you’re WRONG! This is NEWS! Kate Gosselin has changed her haircut, and it’s probably the most important thing on the entire planet. We’re not exaggerating. Here’s why – until now Kate Gosselin was primarily known for her old haircut; a bizarre mishmash of around 14 other equally horrific haircuts, including the Inverted Mullet, the Peacock Spike-Strip and the Bad Spider-Man Emo Swoop.

But Kate Gosselin’s new haircut means we can all just focus on her questionable parenting skills instead. Huzzah!

You can insult Kate Gosselin all you like, but you can’t say that the woman isn’t self-aware. Because Kate Gosselin’s skill for self-awareness is extraordinary – literally every time she reacts to anything, you can guarantee that the reaction has been processed, adapted and rehearsed until it’s both perfect and critic-proof.

Why, just look at everything that Kate Gosselin has had to endure in recent months. She’s split up with her husband. She’s been photographed hitting her children. She’s been filmed refusing to help her thirsty children while simultaneously swigging from a bottle of mineral water. She’s caused domestic scenes so ugly that police officers had to intervene. She’s been accused of emotional abuse. She’s been investigated for violating child labour laws. She’s been called fame hungry, money hungry and a shrewish, self-centred, awful control freak who exemplifies everything bad about humanity.

But Kate Gosselin has got the perfect reaction to all of that.

She’s got a new haircut.

No, wait, bear with us. Kate Gosselin getting a haircut is a step in the right direction, at least. It’s an acknowledgement that her last haircut wasn’t just an awful haircut, but that it was about 38 awful haircuts all bundled on top of each other, leaving her looking like Gok Wan‘s annoyingly shrill half-stuffed scarecrow. So a new haircut – any new haircut – would be a step up for Kate Gosselin. So what does it look like? We’ve kept you in suspense for too long. Here’s Us Magazine with a description:

The 34-year-old mom of eight — whose asymmetrical hairdo has been widely buzzed about — showed off a wavy new look on her second day guest co-hosting ABC’s The View Tuesday. “Isn’t it cute?” she said… “The girls back there” did it, she said, referring to the ABC show’s hair stylists. “Ooh, baby!”

So basically it’s the same haircut as before, except just curly enough to make her look exactly like the sort of butch, constantly-drunk trailer park matriarch who goes around attacking strangers with a rolling pin. You know what’d set that haircut off nicely? A dirty great tattoo of an anchor on her forearm.

Still, according to our never-wrong Jon & Kate Plus 8 Reactomometer, Jon Gosselin now has 72 hours to parade around a TV show with his new haircut. We don’t know about you, but we think he’d look great with an ascending two-part Jheri Curl.

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Even though American Idol finished long ago, one question remains. That question is ‘Seriously? No Boundaries? What were they thinking?’

Oh, and the other question is ‘Is Adam Lambert gay?’ It’s still a hot topic of conversation – in fact, internet research shows that when it comes to things that are nobody’s business about a man we’ll never hear about again from a TV show that’s already ended, Adam Lambert’s sexuality is one of the highest-trending subjects.

At least that was before Kara DioGuardi inadvertently told everyone watching The View that Adam Lambert is as gay as can be yesterday. Whoops.

In all of television history, there’s never been an individual quite as tragic as Kara DioGuardi. Cursed from birth to resemble the photographer from Just Shoot Me so closely that people routinely approach her to say how much they loved her bitpart as The Murderer in AI, becoming the fourth judge on American Idol was supposed to be Kara’s big break.

In reality, though, it’s been one giant mess after another. First Kara Dioguardi started fighting with Simon Cowell, then she started fighting with Paula Abdul, then she wrote the American Idol winning single No Boundaries – an improbably bad car-crash of a song that sounds like a direct amalgamation of all the music from every single tacky aftershave commercial from the 1980s, only worse – and now it’s time for her to put the cherry on the cake. The gay cherry on the cake of humiliating indiscretion, that is.

We’re talking, of course, about Adam Lambert. Throughout American Idol Adam Lambert has tried to keep his sexuality as ambiguous as possible, in that he’s never explicitly declared himself to be gay even though he interprets all of his songs like a man desperate to elbow his way onto the Caligula soundtrack and he’s probably got a boyfriend. But Adam Lambert’s refusal to state his sexuality is his choice, and that choice should be respected by everyone.

Everyone except for Kara DioGuardi, that is, because she went on The View yesterday and blew the whole stinking thing wide open. MSNBC reports:

Barbara Walters asked if she felt Lambert’s perceived sexuality had an impact on “Idol” voters. “I don’t think that Adam was ever in (the closet),” [Kara replied] “I think he was always openly out.” Walters reportedly pressed DioGuardi about her comment that Lambert “was always openly out.” “I think he was,” DioGuardi answered. “I mean, from what I’ve seen … I do. I never thought he wasn’t.”

There’s no word about how Adam Lambert reacted to this sudden outing by Kara DioGuardi, but we can’t imagine that he’ll be pleased – after all, Adam’s deliberate mystique over his sexuality is just about the only thing keeping him from second-place obscurity right now, and Kara’s clumsiness has probably just put an end to that. That means, in effect, that Kara DioGuardi has turned Adam Lambert into the new Justin Guarini.

And that’s a nightmare. Have you ever tried to accessorise a pair of shoes with a haircut like Justin’s? Nightmare.

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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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There’s a saying in these parts: ‘You can take the lady out of The View, but you can’t stop her from screeching about it like a fat lunatic.’

And it’s true, too. Just the other week, Star Jones was screeching about The View like a fat lunatic and we don’t even know who she is. And now it’s the turn of Rosie O’Donnell to do the same, although helpfully since she acts like a fat lunatic most of the time anyway, it’s easier for her.

Rosie O’Donnell has been involved in a spat with the old Skeletor lady from The View because Rosie O’Donnell says everyone on The View hates each other and Skeletor lady says they don’t. But it’s much more interesting than that because… no, wait. It’s not more interesting than that. That’s literally as interesting as this gets. A fat lady has shouted at an old lady. As you were, everyone.

Next week, some bright spark has decided to let Rosie O’Donnell back on the TV, where she’ll host her very own primetime variety show. It’s Rosie’s big chance to prove that she’s more than the angry red-faced one from The View who looked like she’d come round and shove firecrackers into your dog’s anus if you ever disagreed with her about anything.

So the promotion of this new show was always going to need a full-on charm offensive from Rosie. No wailing about the war, no being a lesbian any more than she had to, and definitely no starting fights with anyone. And definitely no mentions of The View.

So naturally Rosie O’Donnell decided to start a fight with everyone on The View. Rosie told reporters:

“[Barbara Walters] wanted everyone to believe and think and act as if [the women on The View] get along and are really good friends and happy and hang out together, and, you know, that’s just not the reality. I’m not saying they loathe each other, but the fact of the matter is there was not a lot of camaraderie off camera.”

But, hey, that’s just Rosie O’Donnell being Rosie O’Donnell. Being forthright and sort of obnoxious is what she does best. And gracefully ignoring problems to the extent where you think she’s either dozed off or died peacefully while nobody was looking is what Barbara Walters does, which is why she didn’t react to Rosie O’Donnell at all. Apart from when she did, by going on The View and saying this:

“There are some people who have done this show and then for years feel they have to dump on it, maybe for publicity, and that not only hurts me, but I resent it. So if the shoe fits, lady—ladies—get on with your lives.”

Notice that Barbara Walters referred to ‘ladies’ there. That’s either because she was talking about Star Jones who recently had a similar outburst about The View, or because Rosie O’Donnell is now so fat she can only be alluded to in the plural. We can’t really be bothered to find out.

Anyway, so that’s it. Rosie O’Donnell said something mean about Barbara Walters, Barbara Walters said something mean back to Rosie O’Donnell and that’s it. Oh, except that Rosie O’Donnell has decided to say something mean back to Barbara Walters in a webcam message on her blog even though nobody really asked her to. E! Online:

O’Donnell posted a video item titled “Lady,” which shows the former talk show host making faces in response to Walters’ remarks. “Whew, I do not know what Star Jones and Debbie Matenopoulos did,” O’Donnell sarcastically adds at the end, name-checking two other examples of View cohosts past. “Whew, lady, she is pissed off.”

And that’s definitely it now. Both women have said their piece and both The View and Rosie O’Donnell’s show have got piles of publicity because of it. True, this Rosie O’Donnell/ Barbara Walters fight will probably result in an attention-strapped Elisabeth Hasselbeck trying to muscle in on the spotlight by setting herself on fire while running around kicking puppies in the sternum within the next few days, but we should probably just deal with that when it happens.

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.

Before Whoopi Goldberg there was Rosie O’Donnell, and before Rosie O’Donnell there was Star Jones – we don’t know who she is, but she sure is angry.

Star Jones used to be a panellist on The View but, from what we’ve gathered, she left the show under a cloud a few years ago because nobody really liked how morbidly chub-faced she was. But some time has passed since Star Jones left The View, enough time for everything to blow over and heal the cracks in her broken heart.

That’s why, over two entire years since she left The View, Star Jones has decided to come forward and describe everyone on the show as ‘hateful’ and make all kinds of froth-mouthed claims about how she was set up. It’s exciting stuff, so just imagine how much more exciting it’d be if we knew or cared who Star Jones actually was.

The tone of The View is largely dictated by the woman sitting on the left hand side of the screen. When Rosie O’Donnell occupied that spot, watching an episode of The View was a little like spending an hour sitting in a burning rape alarm factory. And now that Whoopi Goldberg is in her place, the tone is just as laid-back and reflective as you’d expected from a show moderated by the Jesus alien from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

But before either of those two, that position belonged to Star Jones, a woman presumably named after the fact she was as large as a massive luminous ball of plasma. A lawyer, Star Jones was a member of The View‘s panel for nine years, but apparently alienated viewers because it was claimed that she exploited her fame by getting companies to work on her wedding for free in return for on-air endorsements by Star Jones. Also, she had a gastric band and didn’t tell anyone. Also, she got married to an effete man. Unforgivable, the lot of them.

And so Star Jones’ contract wasn’t renewed. But that was way back in 2006, and nobody can hold a grudge for that long, right?

Apparently Star Jones can. Speaking to Essence magazine this month, Star Jones goes on a one-woman rampage against her former View co-stars that would be absolutely shocking if we a) knew who Star Jones was, b) watched The View, c) cared about any of this or d) couldn’t instantly think of 10,000 things that are more important than a skinny fat woman bleating on about something that only she has any interest in. MSNBC reports:

“Star is back,” she told Essence magazine in the November issue. “I have now proven to myself that whatever life throws at me, I can catch it and I can throw it right back. I’m confident again.”… “Those girls were hateful,” Star said of the “View” cohorts. “I ate the whole time,” she revealed. “I ate in my room alone. And I got fatter and fatter.”

But, like the woman herself said, Star is back. We genuinely have no idea what that means, because Star Jones could spend an hour jumping around in front of us telling us again and again what her name is, we still wouldn’t have any idea who she flipping was.

Still, though, managing to realise that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is hateful – this Star Jones woman clearly deserves some sort of medal for observation.

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.

Ask yourself this – is there anything really more romantic than an unconvincing on/off relationship between two people who you don't really care about?

Jessica Simpson doesn't seem to think so, because she's slap-bang in the middle of one as we speak and it's all she can bloody well carp on about. Jessica Simpson was on The View recently, and seemed weirdly determined to tell everyone how much she and her boyfriend Tony Romo love each other at suspiciously short intervals, despite constant rumours suggesting that they've split up.

Let's hope that Jessica Simpson isn't just staying together with Tony Romo for our sake, because 'Jessica Simpson Starts Crying Because She's Sad And So, So Alone' is a headline that we're itching to use, you know.

Jessica Simpson doesn't have a whole lot going for her at the moment. Her reality TV show career crumbled around the same time that her marriage to Nick Lachey did, her movie career will live or die depending on how soon she's prepared to bite the bullet and slap her hooters out and musically she's been reduced to releasing Come On Over, a opportunistic country single that we presume to be about Bukkake. Even her rubbish sister is more famous than she is now.

But one thing Jessica Simpson does have is Tony Romo. She has him no matter what, because he sees the real Jessica Simpson. It doesn't matter how many curses Jessica puts on Tony's sporting career, how noxious Jessica's piss gets or how many times Tony tries to actively split up with Jessica in public forever – Jessica Simpson isn't going to let go of him, no matter how hard he tries to wriggle away.

And this glorious devotion was on prominent display when Jessica Simpson visited The View recently. Perhaps aware that her jaw is now growing exponentially in proportion to the rest of her face, the View ladies asked Jessica if she had any plans to lock Tony down as a husband before the jaw got so unwieldy that it started to upset her centre of gravity. We're paraphrasing.

Anyway, here's how Jessica Simpson answered:

"You know, we're still together. We've been together seven, almost eight months now, and I don't really know about wedding bells. But I still love him, and I'm still with him — and that's pretty good sign!"

So that relentless stream of reports about Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo splitting up must be a dirty sack of lies, then. Still, even if they are still together Jessica Simpson must know only too well that 'I'm still with him and that's a pretty good sign' is nowhere near good enough. Who'll give her a reality TV show with that sort of inconclusive relationship status? Nobody, that's who.

If Jessica Simpson is serious about this relationship, she knows what she'll have to do – lie about her contraception and hope that the ensuing pregnancy will coax Tony Romo into a shame-based marriage proposal. Shotgun weddings are the Simpson family way, after all.

Since this year's Oscars were made of about 85% retrospective clips, it meant that viewers were forced to watch every last self-congratulatory moment from Oscar history on Sunday. 

Except one – thanks to a heartbreaking oversight, Vassilis Fotopoulos' speech after winning the Best Art Direction Oscar for Zorba The Greek in 1964 was cruelly omitted from the proceedings.

Oh, and everything Whoopi Goldberg ever did. Despite winning an Oscar – and being the Oscars host on four separate occasions between 1994 and 2001 – there was no sign of Whoopi Goldberg anywhere in all the endless montages on Sunday. And that made Whoopi Goldberg cry. On TV. Video after the jump.

Jon Stewart had better watch out, otherwise he'll fall prey to the Curse Of The Oscar Host. It's a curse you may not have heard of, mainly because we've just invented it, but it's still true. It involves people who have hosted the Oscars becoming uncontrollable emotional wrecks about shit that nobody cares about on television. It started when 2007 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres wailed about a puppy on her TV show, and now it's continuing with four-time Oscar host Whoopi Goldberg.

You see, thanks to the writers' strike, Sunday's Oscar show was brimming with the kind of dreary nostalgic clip montages that bore the life out of you if you're young and falsely reinforce the idea that things were better in the past if you're young. On and on they went – there's Cuba Gooding Jr, there's David Letterman, there's Celine Dion, there's fucking Snow White singing a bastardised duet of Proud Mary with titting Rob Lowe for christ's sake – and yet nobody thought to include any Whoopi Goldberg.

And on The View yesterday, Whoopi Goldberg had tears in her eyes thanks to the upset that goes along with being ignored by a tedious clip package in an over-long, obscenely smug awards ceremony. Look, here's the video…

Ridiculous, isn't it? After all, we didn't see any Xena Warrior Princess in any of the Oscar montages, and we doubt she's particularly cut up about it.

Then again, as the women on The View pointed out, Whoopi Goldberg was only the second black woman to win an Oscar and the first woman to host the Oscars at all, which does make her slightly significant. Maybe the clip researchers should have double-checked their list to make sure they weren't leaving anyone important out.

Or maybe – just maybe – the only person in the entire world who even slightly cares about any of this is Whoopi Goldberg, and everyone else is happy that she was left out of all the montages because it made the Oscars five or six seconds shorter than they otherwise would have been.

Still, though, Whoopi Goldberg's tearful reaction to the snub just shines a light on the difference between her and her predecessor on The View. Because if Rosie O'Donnell had hosted the Oscars and missed out on a montage clip, the Kodak Theatre would be a mess of rubble, steel and fragments of Jack Nicholson's skull by now.

Read more:

Whoopi Goldberg Chokes Up Over Oscar Montage – People