“The View” from here isn’t pretty

* Note: This report derives from an early-Thursday East-Coast feed. As car ads state, your mileage may vary.

After Wednesday’s apocalyptic clash of cultures on “The View” between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck (which seemed to get even Joy Behar’s skin crawling), one would have hoped for something of a détente today. Alas, one would have been disappointed, as the battle escalated into actual bloodshed.

It began innocently enough, with a chipper discussion of dessert toppings. But when Elisabeth declared Redi-Whip her favorite, O’Donnell assailed Hasselbeck’s views as “puerile and uninformed, just like every other asinine thought that dribbles out of your mouth, like a trollop familiar with too many drunken sailors.” Rosie, instead, championed Cool Whip.

Hasselback jokingly replied, “Well, I cede this debate to you, Rosie, since you’re clearly the expert when it comes to fattening foodstuffs,” and the studio audience, which had tensed up, emitted as one a relieved, good-natured guffaw. But frictions escalated as conversation drifted, predictably enough, to politics, specifically the Oklahoma Rail Act of 1897, created by Congress to protect armadillos from getting squashed by freight trains.

O’Donnell groused that Congress willfully defanged the measure during the 1950s and ’60s, when interstate highways traversing the country were being built in record numbers, further endangering the beleaguered armadillo. Hasselbeck interjected that suggested regulations – such as retrofitting all automobiles with foam-rubber protection devices that would gently bump armadillos off the nation’s freeways – were “Draconian, particularly in light of the conservative, anti-regulatory mood informing Washington at the time.”

Behar, sensing the rising tension, attempted to deflect the conversation with a wan, stale joke about Sanjaya Malakar, but Rosie was having none of it. “Elisabeth, have you ever seen a living armadillo outside of a zoo?” she demanded.

Hasselbeck sputtered, “Well, uh, no, but I haven’t seen one in a zoo, either…” when O’Donnell pounced: “That’s my point, kewpie-doll! You sit there in those cheery Gap summer dresses, professing to be pro-life, but the fact that this country is nothing but a rolling death trap for hundreds of thousands of innocent armadillos means nothing to you! We've become nothing more than a nation of crushed shells lying by the side of the road!”

“I may not have seen an armadillo, but I’ve encountered more than my fair share of scaly, waddling subliterates!” Hasselbeck shot back, causing co-host Barbara Walters to swallow the upper plate of her dentures.

At that, O’Donnell sprang from her seat and began pummeling the pregnant Hasselbeck, inducing labor and, eventually, the premature birth of Elisabeth’s infant, whose limbs O’Donnell set upon, announcing amidst her angry gnawing, “The last thing this world needs is another pious puzzlewit justifying the clueless war crimes of a President whose reckless, bratty policies have been abandoned by 72 percent of the populace!” Behar tried to alleviate the confrontation by making a joke about Fox’s new reality show “On the Lot,” but since no one had seen it, her bon mot fell flat.

Hasselbeck then prayed to her Lord to smite O’Donnell, and, somewhat unexpectedly, He quickly complied. Walters, standing, shocked, over O’Donnell’s lifeless form, and realizing there was no overhead camera for her to turn to and shriek “Noooooooooo!” to, instead declared: “We’ll be right back. We hope.”

When the show resumed, the remaining cast cheerfully interviewed Ramzan Kadyrov, designer of infant novelty bibs.