What if Fox & Friends is actually a biting, tough-edged parody of the rest of the Fox News network, and the rest of us just haven't caught on yet? Elizabeth Hasselbeck hasn't been co-hosting the show for long, but she's already challenging Steve Doocy and the guy who isn't Steve Doocy in their years-running campaign to be known as The Dumb One.

Here she is Monday morning during one of the show's regular visits from special guest troll Stuart Varney; the subject today is United Healthcare, the company that will no doubt someday invent Soylent Green, and you can quote me on that, dropping thousands of doctors from their Medicare Advantage program, the program designed to supplement Medicare for senior citizens:



“And many of those people are women who are expecting babies and who may just have a real relationship with their physician and want to see the same doctor deliver possibly their second child. And they are now left in the dark in a time that they feeling quite vulnerable.” Even Varney was forced to remind Hasselbeck, “Most of them are elderly.”

When even Stuart McScrewEveryone Varney has to back up the Fox News outrage train because you've lost your grip and fallen off into a snowbank, things are bad.

Ah, but as parody? What if—and hear me out on this one—the entire Fox & Friends staff have been secret apostates for years. What if, the wags among them say one day, what if we put on a show that is so bad, that fumbles the daily talking points so transparently, a show run by obvious imbeciles doing nothing but throwing pies at the audience through the whole thing—how long would it take everyone else in the network to catch on? Days? Weeks?

And maybe that is how we get Elizabeth Hasselbeck talking about the plight of all those senior citizens expecting babies but not knowing if they'll have to switch doctors in the delivery room. They're just trying to see how much they can get away with before the network heads and the bleary-eyed morning viewers finally put down their coffees, furrow their eyebrows and say hmm. Something is not right here. But it's been years now, and nobody has caught on yet.