If someone came up to you and started rattling off the reasons that the moon landing was faked, could you respond?

 "You can see the flag wave in the wind! And the photos lacked stars! And they all would have died traveling through the Van Allen radiation belt!"

 If you're like most Americans, you'd know the guy is a crank but you would have no idea how to respond to each of his crazed points other than to punch him in his dumb monkey face and yell, "You're a crank! Stop with the mouth moving and the sound coming out of it, you nitwit!"

 A political ambush is hard to respond to in a reasonable fashion, because the crank controls the battlefield by spouting out "facts" you are ill-prepared for. Any idiot can read some article or some internet ramblings and then recite them to the unsuspecting... and many idiots do. The fool then thinks he won the debate when all he's done is left you confused and surprised.

There's no wind on the moon, but the flag is waving! And where are the stars?

 This is why many sympathized with poor Elisabeth Hasselbeck who was met with this scenario constantly and on live television with no escape. Hasselbeck already had to deal with the insufferable and pea-brained Joy Behar who could recite Democrat talking points with the near accuracy of a trained parrot -- annoying but predictable -- but then came the raging monstrosity of Rosie O'Donnell. She's pure hate and stupidity squished into one amorphous blob with but one goal: To make people think it's smart. Rosie had the public's laughter -- as any clown could claim -- but she wanted their respect. So she -- through either design or through accident of her chubby fingers mistyping as they mashed against her sticky keyboard -- came to websites with ideas even outside the mainstream of what's referred to as "liberal thought."

 "When I tell the people these things they don't know, I will be the smart one!" she burbled to herself as her many chins were lit by the glow of her nacho cheese-stained monitor. "They will love and respect me!"

 Of course, to look smart, it helps to have another look dumb, and Rosie had the perfect foil in Elisabeth Hasselbeck, as that woman dared to be everything Rosie wasn't: slim, blond, attractive, and heterosexual. Worst yet, Hasselbeck was a Republican, and, by the understanding Rosie had as taught by her friends in Hollywood, people only became Republicans as an expression of their love of evil.

 So Rosie spouted her shiny new ideas aimed at the young Hasselbeck with Behar snickering all the while out of a nervous habit of incomprehension. Many criticized Hasselbeck for not standing in front of the charging, lesbian rhino, meeting force with force, but that ignores the ambush taking place and that Hasselbeck is no pundit -- she is only as well informed as any regular American. How could she be prepared for the assertion that the World Trade Center Building 7 was blown up by the government? And if someone came up to you and loudly and obnoxiously stated that fire could not melt steel, how long would it take you to recover from the shock of the surrealness of the situation to respond?

 Hasselbeck had not signed on to fight against a hippopotamus thrashing about in waters of ignorance and conspiracy, but she tried in her own meek manner. The second time the WTC 7 was brought up, she was prepared to meet Rosie with some facts, but she was then broadsided by statements that Giuliani had shuttled steel off to China as a cover up. Lesson learned: You can't stay ahead of a crank -- not unless you're willing to search out the facts of every single wacko conspiracy out there like some sort of Wikipedia Brown.

 But while Rosie thought she won the debate on stage since Hasselbeck never rose to meet her fury, she was not prepared for the reaction of the public at large. Apparently people took the "facts" Rosie put out there and then followed them to their logical conclusions. This caught Rosie off guard because she lacks the mental capacity to reach those logical conclusions herself. It may seem obvious to you that if someone states that our troops killed 655,000 Iraqis and then asks, "Who are the real terrorists?", the implication is that our troops are terrorists. But Rosie was really just asking a question she didn't know the answer to. She thought she could just spout things she read on the internet and sound smart; she had no idea people would put any meaning to the things she was saying. Thus the real pain in her eyes when she asked Hasselbeck, "Do you believe I think the troops are terrorists?" The correct answer would be, "No, I don't believe you have any political thought quite that coherent."

 How the now despised Rosie lashed out at little Hasselbeck, a warthog snarling at a bunny. Her attempts to look smart and gain love and respect had failed horribly, and her only consolation was batting around the blond woman in front of a studio audience. But finally Hasselbeck struck back, meeting the blubbering intensity of Rosie with equal passion. Thoroughly defeated, she called Hasselbeck a coward and quickly waddled away to her swamp to write her faux-poetry on her blog which resembled what one would expect to be the result if one of those signing chimps were taught to type. And cheer we all did, for Hasselbeck, no greater than the rest of us, struck a blow for all those ever cornered by an obnoxious idiot so fool and pitiful as to convince himself that he's smart.

Frank J. is a syndicated columnist who is against the idea of women being left alone to chat about politics.

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