On Wednesday’s The View on ABC, during a discussion of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s standup comedy routine from Tuesday night’s Tonight Show on NBC, The View co-host Joy Behar downgraded Palin’s performance asserting that her confidence on stage came across as unusually "delusional" for a woman trying to do standup, and suggested that Palin is "almost delusional" to believe she could be President: "The thing that fascinates me about her is her confidence as a standup. It took me so long to get that confidence. It’s the same confidence that she has that she thinks she could be President. It’s almost delusional."

After co-host Sherri Shepherd theorized that having confidence would help Palin run for President, Behar went on to suggest that Palin does not really plan on such a run because choosing to work at FNC would make her seem too conservative to appeal to moderates and, though she may have been referring to Democrats with presidential ambitions as she seemed to ignore MSNBC figures like Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chuck Todd and Howard Dean who all have histories of involvement with the Democratic party, Behar went on to assert that "you don’t see the Democrats hosting shows on MSNBC."

Behar: "Don’t you think that the fact that she’s a commentator at Fox positions her to be too far to the right to be attractive to middle Americans, to people who are moderate? ... but if you’re too far, you don’t see the Democrats hosting shows on MSNBC."

Below is a transcript of relevant portions of the Wednesday, March 3, The View on ABC:

Fox's family-friendly "American Idol" is headed down the tubes if Howard Stern and Perez Hilton have anything to do with it.

Stern, while now on XM Sirius Satellite Radio, dominated the public airwaves for more than 20 years as a shock jock. Regular discussions on his show revolved around celebrities' sexual proclivities, complete with explicit language. Strippers and porn stars were regular guests. As of 2005, the FCC had fined him more than any other radio broadcaster to the tune $2.5 million. He migrated to satellite radio to escape FCC rules.

Gossip blogger Hilton built his career by enhancing paparazzi shots of celebrities with crude white drawings of genitalia and bodily fluids and posting them on his site, PerezHilton.com, and outing gay celebrities. He injected politics into the Miss USA pageant last spring as a judge when he asked about same-sex marriage. He continually harassed former Miss California Carrie Prejean on his Web site after she expressed a belief in the traditional view of marriage in response to his question.  

After "Idol" judge Simon Cowell, known for his brutal honesty, announced on Jan. 11 that this would be his last season as part of the wildly popular singing competition, Stern and Hilton both pitched themselves as his replacement, and entertainment journalists applauded. 

Comedian Joy Behar is known for saying some pretty absurd things on television, but her comment on Wednesday's "The View" was nothing less than disgraceful.

When co-host Barbara Walters brought up the issue of Sarah Palin, and how White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had made a joke to the press pool by writing some notes on his hand, a rather heated discussion broke out with lone conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck making the case that such behavior is beneath the office of the President.

"When the Press Secretary is up there being the mouthpiece for the White House during a time of crisis like we've been in for so long, don't make a joke and write on your hand. You are the Press Secretary of the White House."

This didn't sit well with Behar who actually responded (video embedded below the fold, h/t Story Balloon):

It was a metaphysical certitude the classic battle between Fox News's Roger Ailes and liberal publisher Arianna Huffington on Sunday's "This Week" would send many in the mainstream media over the top, and comedian Joy Behar didn't disappoint.

As "View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg gave the audience the background of the matter Monday -- "Fox News president Roger Ailes pointed out that on the Huffington Post he's been called quote a malignant tumor with a face like a fist" -- Behar interrupted, "It's not true."

Moments later, the opinionated comedian demonstrated her astounding lack of knowledge saying, "According to what I've read, first of all, the guy who wrote this tumor thing was not talking about him. He was talking about Fox."

She erroneously continued (video embedded below the fold, h/t NB reader Carla Brehm):

If it isn't obvious already, Joy Behar doesn't know when to keep her mouth shut. On Jan. 26's "The View," a clueless Behar accidentally tipped the agenda of much of the gay and same-sex marriage movement.

"They," she said, referring to gays, "don't take monogamy and infidelity the same way that the straight community does."

Such things as fidelity, she added, don't have the "same weight" with gays as with straights, and - you might want to sit down for this - Behar was actually right for once.

With the latest battle over same-sex marriage brewing in a California federal court, gays are claiming that they simply want the right to participate in traditional marriage. But that couldn't be further from the truth. As a previous CMI article noted, many gays don't want to just participate in traditional marriage. They want to radically change it.

Discounting the pro-life argument of a planned Focus on the Family Super Bowl ad featuring Tim Tebow's mother, Joy Behar told the audience of the January 26 "View" that the Florida quarterback just as easily could have been a "rapist pedophile." [audio available here]

"What are people flippin' out about," bewildered moderator Whoopi Goldberg -- herself an ardent pro-choice activist -- asked.

"The only argument against any of it is, that, you know, he could just as easily become some kind of a rapist pedophile. I mean, you don't know what someone's going to be," Behar answered, adding:

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos appeared on The View, Monday, and attempted to deflect some of the over-the-top praise heaped on him after he joined Good Morning America. He protested, "I did not like all of the introduction stuff, all the ‘let's go back and talk to everybody from your entire life.’ But we got through it."

On the January 4, 2010 show that Stephanopoulos was referring to, his friend, Democrat James Carville, appeared to coo, "I once said, 'If you converted his IQ to Fahrenheit, you could boil water.'" A graphic on that program proclaimed, "George Is Smart."

On Monday, View co-host Barbara Walters asked Stephanopoulos if President Obama could "recover" from a string of electoral losses. The Democratic operative turned journalist was emphatic [See video above]: "Yeah. I mean, look, he's more popular now than Ronald Reagan was his second year in office, the same time." Of course, Reagan didn’t have a willing media ready to spin failures from his first year.

World News anchor Charles Gibson appeared on Monday’s edition of The View to tout his own objectivity and to swear, "I'm very fond of John McCain. I carry no water for Obama." Speaking of the 2008 election, he marveled, "It was an amazing moment to say to the country that we have elected and African American as the 44th president of the United States.... It was just an amazing moment for the- for the progress of this country..." [Audio available here.]

Asked by co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck about the difficulty of maintaining objectivity, the ABC anchor, who famously grilled then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, piously explained, "But, you're always trying to breed that subjectivity out of anything that you may do. I've talked about this before. But, it's very controversial in my family and my children think I'm absolutely nuts. I don't vote."

Gibson said he came to this decision after becoming emotionally involved with a candidate who won his heart: "I covered a candidate once in an election and I came to care whether that candidate won or lost. And I thought, there's something wrong here and that may, in some way, permeate what you're saying on the air. And, because, I became very- I just liked the guy."

"View" host Barbara Walters claimed "any publicity is good publicity" to "American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert this morning, but the record sales of his first album tell a different story.

While "For Your Entertainment" sold 198,000 copies and took the number three spot on the Billboard charts during its debut week, sales dropped 74 percent in its second week, causing the album to tumble to number 22 on the charts. It was the biggest drop on the Top 200 chart.

"If you're an Adam Lambert partisan, you can try to spin it all you want, but that's just bad," reported USA Today's Brian Mansfield on Dec. 9.  He also noted that only sales of Susan Boyle's album dropped more than Lambert, but even Boyle "still outsold Adam by a margin of more than 10-1."

On Friday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC, during the regular "Dumbest Things of the Week" segment, host Bill O’Reilly and guest Greg Gutfeld of FNC’s Red Eye, possibly picking up on an item posted the day before on Newsbusters, highlighted ABC’s The View co-host Joy Behar’s recent defense of Tiger Woods as she opined that at least the golf star is not being a "hypocrite" like "one of these pro-marriage, right-wing kind of guys who is anti-gay."

After playing a clip from The View, Gutfeld responded: "I just can't believe she's still single. What a catch. ... This angers me, one, that she says that if you're a conservative you're anti-gay, which is bigotry, her own form of bigotry. Number two, she insults the left. She's saying that the left, because they have no standards, cannot be hypocrites. Therefore, they can get away with things."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the segment from the Friday, December 4, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC:

On Dec. 4, the Australian actress Portia de Rossi, wife of Ellen DeGeneres, appeared on both ABC's "Good Morning America" and "The View" to promote her ABC sitcom ‘Better off Ted" ... well, supposedly. In reality, ABC simply offered de Rossi a soapbox to rant about gay rights.

During his interview with de Rossi, GMA correspondent Bill Weir called DeGeneres and de Rossi a "beautiful couple" and gushed, "Every time we see you two together the affection is still so obvious."

Weir then asked de Rossi a long-winded question about legalizing gay marriage, which included a prophecy of his own.

"And you're a testament for this sort of thing," Weir began, "and - I don't want to get too political on you but there probably will be a day when this is not a novelty - but when you see sort of the votes that happen - some setbacks politically - how do you think about that in your house?"

On the Thursday, December 3, The View, on ABC, co-host Joy Behar found Tiger Woods worthy of being partially defended over his adultery saga – according to her, at least he’s not a "hypocrite" like "these pro-marriage, right-wing, kind of guys who is anti-gay," like former Republican Senator Larry Craig. As the group discussed the latest news of women who have alleged having affairs with the golf star, Behar offer up her defense of Woods, with conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck struggling to rebut her while Behar sang, "La, la, la, la," as Hasselbeck spoke:

The media might finally be tiring of the profane, misogynistic blogger Perez Hilton. On his Dec. 2 interview on "The View," the five female hosts of the show relentlessly fired at him from every angle, ranging from his exploitation of children to his infamous reputation of outing gays. This was especially surprising considering the way Hilton has been treated by the media elite in the past.

For years, broadcast and cable networks and even newspapers have presented Hilton's offensive blog - dubbed a "tastemaker" by the LA Times - as harmless and entertaining. In 2007, ABC's Jake Tapper called it "snarky, amusing, cool and fishy," and, in 2009, CBS correspondent Erica Hill called Hilton's commentary "a little tongue-in-cheek, maybe some snide remarks here about some perhaps not so flattering moments."

Yesterday, though, during his appearance on "The View," Hilton might have finally realized that his love affair with the media won't last forever.

Over the last decade, Rod Stewart has put a lot of work into cleaning up his act to give the appearance of growing old gracefully. But as a Dec. 1 appearance on ABC's "The View" proved, underneath the torch-songs and the lounge singer exterior, he's still Mr. "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy." Stewart defended American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert's sordid sexual act at the American Music Awards, saying, "It's rock 'n roll."

Lambert's over-the-top, in-your-face AMA performance last week featured male dancers on leashes, an open-mouth kiss between Lambert and his male keyboardist, and simulated oral sex, both male-on-male and female-on-male.

Even MTV has admitted that Lambert's AMA performance was "one that frequently crossed the border from sexy to rather graphic, and which put some previous provocative awards-show appearances by Madonna to shame."

There's nothing like tuning into an episode of "The View" for a little exploration of social sensitivities in the modern American culture.

In keeping with that tradition, on Black Friday, a term used to describe the Friday following Thanksgiving, which is the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season, the use of the word "black" to mark this occasion was a topic of discussion on "The View" for its potential "racist" implications.

Co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, who has her own primetime HLN cable show, debated the use of "black" on the Nov. 27 pre-recorded broadcast. Goldberg, a black woman, took the meaning to be a positive and that there was nothing wrong with it used that way. Behar, however, was trouble with the word "black" used in conjunction with Friday, taking the meaning as a negative (emphasis added):

If you thought that you were going to escape being greenwashed by simply changing the channel for NBC's "Green Week," think again. Now you can't even wile away your time reading a good ol' fashioned thriller. Stephen King's new book, "Under the Dome," depicts a small city on the brink of an environmental disaster (that is, if it can survive the murders, arson, and corruption, of course).

Set in fictional Chester's Mill, Maine, the 1,000+ page tome (King's longest since "It") details the demise of a small town that mysteriously becomes stuck under an invisible, impenetrable dome.

The town faces such King clichés as deception, rape, and drug addiction, but it also discovers that it's on the fast track to environmental doom. The book review by Kevin Kelly of Mercury News describes the town's desperate situation.

"You can't see the dome - until it becomes smudged on the outside by the accumulation of smog and things running into it and leaving stains," he said. "With no steady influx of new air, Chester's Mill begins to smell like a locker room and plants start dying, and as the dome becomes more and more smeared with grime from the outside world, the temperature inside climbs."

Profits, not the killing of unborn children, are the "real immorality" of abortion, according to "View" panelist Joy Behar.

Behar expressed her unique view of morality during  the Nov. 3 "Hot Topics" discussion about Abby Johnson, a Texas Planned Parenthood director who resigned from her post last month after seeing an abortion on an ultrasound.

Johnson explained to the local Texas CBS affiliate that Planned Parenthood had been pressuring her to focus on abortion, not pregnancy prevention because abortions brought in more money than family planning services.

ABC's "View" host Barbara Walters brought up Johnson's story, calling it "controversial" and Behar quickly denounced Planned Parenthood for making money off abortions. She called it "gross" and "obnoxious" before she stated, "I don't see abortions as a profit-making industry. I think that that is the real immorality of it."

So Whoopi Goldberg is a fan of the "We Report, You Decide" school of TV journalism. Who knew? Unfortunately, her choice of "fair and balanced" news icons leaves much to be desired.

With Rush Limbaugh now out of a group vying to purchase the St. Louis Rams, the continued smearing from ABC's "The View" on October 15 constitutes a late hit.

Whoopi Goldberg said that Limbaugh was dropped as a potential buyer because they're not "pleased" with him: "It actually might not be about conservativism. This one might be personal." She also claimed that Limbaugh is "part of the mainstream media."

Joy Behar added that Limbaugh likes to "be the victim" and, making Limbaugh owner of the St. Louis Rams would be like "making Michael Vick own the American Kennel Club."

On Oct. 13 "The View" hosts reacted to the news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ruled out a future run for the presidency. "Hillary Clinton told Anne Curry that she will not be making another run for president of the United States, saying she loves her job as Secretary of State and is looking forward to retirement at some point ... Ya know, that kind of made me sad," Whoopi Goldberg lamented.

Sherri Shepherd called Hillary "victorious" - "an inspiration to women" - and equated the news of her retirement with "being hit in the pit of your stomach" and "deflating a balloon."

"Because - not ever calling Hillary Clinton a quitter, but it's something - even when she pulled out, I felt sad," Shepherd said. "Because as a woman, you just look at Hillary as, ‘You don't quit. You always keep going' ... The fact that she's saying, ‘I think I'm going to stop and retire,' it's just like, no, Hillary!"

Rachel Campos-Duffy, former reality-TV star and current blogger for Anderson Cooper's AC360 blog, was Elizabeth Hasselbeck's fill-in on today's edition of The View.  As a conservative fill-in, she did not disappoint.

Before diving into the meat of the blog, however, we at NewsBusters would like to congratulate her on this bit of news [emphasis mine]:

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY: Thank you. And, yes, I found happiness after all. And the news is, because I've never come on "The View," as Joy knows, without announcing a pregnancy. And I am having a sixth child and I'm three months pregnant.

That is wonderful news - congratulations to her and her husband Sean.

Now, containing our pro-life glee for a moment, the Viewettes transitioned from a conversation about Campos-Duffy’s happy home life to a discussion of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win:

Update at bottom (2:03 p.m.): Beck fires back

It's just what the primetime cable news lineup needed - another hour-long program tilted toward left-of-center politics with character assassination on conservatives.

CNN Headline News debuted its "The Joy Behar Show" on Sept. 29, which included appearances by lefty comedian Jeanane Garofalo, CNN's Jack Cafferty and actress Bette Midler. Garofalo doubled down on her low regard for conservative 9/12 and tea party protesters, labeling them as racists. Cafferty went after President Barack Obama for his disregard of the carbon footprint his lobbying efforts in Copenhagen for Chicago to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.

However, actress-turned-Vegas entertainer Bette Midler went straight after former CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck. She was prodded by host Joy Behar, who mentioned Beck as someone who is encouraging a breakdown in so-called "political discourse."

The View's Whoopi Goldberg yesterday offered the most outrageous and despicable defense of child rapist and Hollywood director Roman Polanski yet: "It wasn't rape-rape." That's right. Goldberg tried to claim that Polanksi drugging and having sex with a thirteen year old girl, who repeatedly uttered 'no' to the predator, does not qualify as 'actual' rape (video embedded below the fold).

Polanksi apologists have tried since he was arrested in Switzerland Sunday to excuse his actions on the grounds that he was traumatized by his horrible experiences as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland or that he has endured enough punishment since his conviction in 1978. But Goldberg's defense is so far the most insensitive, oafish attempt for an excuse yet (video embedded below the fold):

On September 25, "The View's" Sherri Shepherd asked Michael Moore, "How do you feel about Obama's health care plan?"

Moore responded, "Aw, geez. I feel so bad for this guy. I mean - I - ya know, he's out there all alone; nobody's got his back. The other side they're out there angry, organized."

Nobody's got his back? Really? Let's take a look at the numbers.

In August, the Business & Media Institute examined 224 stories about health care on the three broadcast networks' morning and evening shows that aired between Jan. 20, the date of Obama's inauguration, and June 24, the night of ABC's prime time town hall special on health care.

The networks favored proponents to critics by a margin of more than 2-to-1 (243 to 104).

“In Denmark – my favorite country – they are the happiest people in the world,” declared Joy Behar on “The View” September 23. They’ve come a long way since Hamlet.

Why are the Danes so contented? Could it be all that Havarti and herring? The satisfaction of knowing that their ancestors plundered and pillaged the entire North Atlantic?  No. According to Behar, the Danes wear the smile of socialism.

“The reason that they’re so happy is because they don’t worry about health care,” she explained. “They don’t worry about sending their kids to college because everything’s paid for.”

It appears Behar was referring to the 2008 World Values Survey that asked 350,000 citizens of 97 different countries two questions: