Thursday, May 31, 2007
Opinion

Missing Rosie

Now that O’Donnell has left the daytime TV chat-fest “The View,” the show’s ratings will most likely tumble...

Happier times: Rosie O’Donnell (left) and Barbara Walters onstage during the 33rd Annual Daytime Emmy Awards on April 28, 2006 in Hollywood, Calif. CREDIT: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

By Eric Von Haessler

“Oh, my God! Did you hear what Rosie said?” Sadly, this weekly refrain around the water coolers and 24-hour news networks of America is now a thing of the past. Now that O’Donnell has left the daytime TV chat-fest “The View,” the show’s ratings will most likely tumble into oblivion and the country will have lost an important provocateur of political debate.

Rosie is wrong about everything (save the fact that she should be able to marry any consenting adult she wishes), but her public expression of the paranoia of the left in such a mainstream forum was just about to pay big dividends for those who oppose her point of “view.”

O’Donnell’s addition to Barbara Walter’s coffee klatch a year ago was perfect timing for O’Donnell, the still unfunny former comic and second-rate actress. She arrived just as the country had decided it had had too much of the war in Iraq and President Bush, who, many believed, had bungled everything. The sort of political commentary that got Michael Moore booed off the stage at the Academy Awards a few years earlier was now seen as prescient, and the national audience was craving more of it to justify their own personal flip-flop on the issues involved.

Then along came Rosie to assure the masses that it wasn’t their fault: They’d been lied to and deceived and there was no reason to feel bad about their former support of everything that they were now against because they’d been tricked into it by the real evildoers, the members of the Bush administration. Round one went to O’Donnell and her friends. The Republicans were decimated in a national election later in the year and President Bush was forced to pursue the war as a lame-duck general who had lost the confidence of his people.

So far, so good. But O’Donnell wasn’t done talking.

Fine with me. If you want to win a debate with a hard-core leftist, just let them keep talking. A mainstream audience may agree with a point here or an opinion there, but will soon grow weary of the nonstop list of grievances that pour forth. The general public is now in agreement with the left that the Iraq mission was a mistake, but there aren’t many who buy into the sort of Sept. 11 conspiracies espoused on the Internet and adopted by O’Donnell and her cohorts.

The truth is that extreme leftists are miserable people who blame the country for every global problem in much the same way that a petulant teenager blames Mom and Dad for everything that isn’t perfect about the world.

Politics is cyclical. And the president did overpromise and underdeliver in Iraq. So, many in the country turned to the political opposition because events on the ground appeared to mirror what the left had been warning for years. But it won’t last: The American people are just about to realize that what seemed like sage truth was really just a coincidence.

When a movement complains about everything under the sun, it is bound to appear to get something right every now and again. But the catalogue of things that the left is wrong about is vast and deep and dwarfs any appearance of correct notions they may stumble upon along the way.

The moronic conservatives who have wasted their time pressuring ABC to fire their least favorite “View” co-host have no understanding of the nature of truly free debate. Worse yet, these conservatives don’t appreciate what an asset she would have been to their cause had she just kept on talking. SP

Eric Von Haessler, formerly of the Regular Guys, is a frequent radio commentator in Atlanta.