I'm currently watching The View on week 3 of my winter vacation from school: They've been having quite a bit of heated debate, now that Rosie has returned from her week-long vacation, and I've been enjoying it for the most part.

However, there is a bit of hypocrisy- Rosie and Joy, and even sometimes Barbara, have been spouting off about the Iraq war, explaining clearly, many of the simple arguments used by the Left, but mentioned scarcely by the Democratic bigwigs: they go off about how Americans aren't seeing all of the gruesome details that were banned from the media by the Bush administration, etc.; they talked about how people don't care enough about it, perhaps, due in part to the restricting of bodies on TV, but then they spend the majority of the show focusing on the celebrities, winter make-up, and other things that Americans are obsessed with instead of caring about the trajectory their globe is taking to hell in a handbasket. and then they wonder why nobody cares enough about the war...

The other odd thing is that following each of the first two hot topic/discussion segments, there were strange pseudo-PSAs that counteracted the main point just made on the show. First, Rosie etc. were responding to the latest Donald Trump nonsense, with Rosie highlighting how ridiculous is that he actually uses "fat" as an insult--as if it's news to her that she's fat. After talking about whether and how the word fat is used in the Carpenter O'Donnell household, they talked about whether you should express concern to the child if your child is fat...They talked more about if you should tell your child to lose weight or not do anythign or try to make them more active, etc...Joy talked about how they can tell whether you value thinness even if you don't say it to them directly, by observing your own behavior about your own weight.

Then, as soon as they went to commercial break, there was a ridiculous ad from the Dairy Council, about how to get your child to lose weight via exercise and other things and of course, by drinking milk "instead of" sugary drinks. I have other comments about this commercial, of course- I couldn't believe it was from the Dairy Council, but then the milk part made perfect sense. But the fact that it came after this segment was pretty funny.

On the next segment, they were bashing Bush, in quite a good, drawn-out, consistent manner, with Joy referring to Sen. Jim Webb's experience standing up to Bush about his sons coming home from Iraq. Elizabeth jumped in with the oft-used semantic argument about how parents can't "send" their children to Iraq- the children must enlist themselves, which is totally not the actual point. Rosie made a good comeback, explaining to Elizabeth and the audience the relationship between wealth and likelihood of joining the army in order to get a college education- a clear, and concise point. As soon as they went to commercial break, not only was there an ad for the Army, but it was directed at parents- to convinve their children to join the armed forces!!!

I'm starting to wonder if they strucutre the ads to relate to the content in this specific way, something which I'd never thought about before. Isn't The View live, though?