But What Would Guinan Say?

As I said during the introduction to my interview last week with the folks from the daily Breitbart.tv B-Cast show, Rosie O’Donnell’s train wreck conspiracy theories were brutal on ABC’s reputation, but train wrecks attract gawkers, and when you’re the legacy media, you gotta do what you gotta do.

And her successor is keeping up the View’s proud tradition:

As if to prove [Ed Morrissey’s] point about the relationship between lunar conspiracy theorists and Truthers, here’s how the idiot who replaced Rosie O’Donnell on “The View” celebrated Apollo 11’s anniversary.

I’m only sorry that Whoopi doesn’t believe the mission seceded.

Update: In the comments, Frank Martin writes:

In regards to conspiracy theories, William Manchester once said that people want a certain symmetry to exist in the affairs of the world; they see 6 million jews on one side of the scale, balanced by the criminals called the nazis on the other side and they see the symmetry of a measure of good counterbalanced by the certainty of evil. When they see John Kennedy on one side of the scale balanced with the hopeless waif of Oswald, they dont see symmetry, so they try to add a conspiracy to help return that sense of symmetry.

The latter is a topic I explored a couple of years ago here. More from Frank:

In the case of the moon landing conspiracies, I think that people find themselves missing the incredible majesty of that moment and hoping to fill that gaping hole in their pitiful and wasted lives, they replace it with the post-watergate “the government lied to us” meme, which lets them off the hook for having never accomplished anything of any real consequence in their lives. They counterbalance the moon landing success by painting it as a “government cover up”, and return the world to its symmetric certainty.

Indeed™. And it’s fascinating that someone like Whoopi, who is pro-Obama and presumably, on some level, would consider herself pro-JFK, (not to mention having guest-starred on numerous episodes of a long-running TV franchise that postulated future space exploration) would entertain theories that JFK’s most lasting achievement is a hoax.

Update: Jim Treacher tweets, “Whoopi knows the moon landings were faked. After all, she and Picard never really went into space either.”