Blonde on Blonde: Lis Was Wrong; Deirdre Was Right; And Did We Mention Lis Was Wrong?

Before flying out to the Imus Ranch later today, Lis Wiehl’s daughter Danielle joined her mother on set this morning during Blonde on Blonde. After peppering her with a few questions, Imus reprimanded the 14-year old for saying “yeah,” and not “yes, sir.”
 
“You’re not at the mall with your stupid friends, getting ready to steal something,” he instructed the now frightened child.
 
After the verdict came down yesterday that Casey Anthony was found not guilty of murdering her two-year old daughter Caylee, Deirdre Imus’s first instinct had been to celebrate that Lis, an attorney and Fox News legal analyst, had been wrong.
 
“You already had her convicted,” Deirdre said. “I’m the one who said this is an O.J. deal, we all know she’s guilty, she killed her daughter but she’s going to get off.”
 
Maintaining composure, Lis asked Deirdre whether she was more concerned with being right than with the verdict itself. “Absolutely,” Deirdre replied, without missing a beat.
 
Regardless of the jury’s decision, Lis stuck to her guns. “The fact that they acquitted her does not mean the same as she is innocent,” she said, adding, “I don’t think I was wrong. I still believe that woman killed her two-year old child.”
 
Citing a lack of evidence, Deirdre was unwilling to go that far. Citing a lack of patience, her husband moved on to the next topic.
 
On its homepage over the weekend, America Online featured an item about how men fake orgasms, and recommended that any male doing so should masturbate to “help discover” what stimulates them. Lis instructed her daughter to cover her ears, then deemed this sort of content too racy for a supposedly family-friendly site like AOL.
 
“Of course it’s not!” Deirdre shot back. “We all want to know about sex.”
 
Lis tried to argue otherwise, but Bernard suggested she stick to what she knows. “We defer to Lis Wiehl on the legal maters, because she’s the expert,” he explained. “We’ll defer to Deirdre Imus on the fake orgasms, because she’s the expert on that.”
 
She’s also the unofficial expert (or “nut,” as Imus put it) on all things autism, and had much to say about a recent study that showed genetic and environmental factors can play a role in causing autism in twins.
 
“We’ve known about this,” said Deirdre, who runs the Deirdre Imus Environmental Health Center. “Finally what they’re doing is putting that on the agenda—mainstream medical studies where they’re seriously looking at environmental factors.”
 
In Lis’s opinion, the sample, which consisted of 50 sets of identical twins and 130 sets of fraternal twins, was too small to extrapolate, but Deirdre insisted the findings are significant, and not unlike the results of some cancer studies.
 
“Fewer than ten percent of cancers are actually genetic,” Deirdre said. “That means 90 percent are caused by or linked to environmental factors.” 
 
Then she ticked off statistics about pre-polluted babies and chemicals in the womb; stressed the need to address problems with the air, water, and dirt supplies; and accused Lis of having no compassion for families coping with autism or cancer diagnoses.
 
“I’m just saying, you have to live in a practical world with practical choices and practical people,” Lis said, adding, “We have to breathe. We have to drink water. We have to walk on the dirt.”
 
Also something “we” have to do, in Imus’s view: call child services to protect little Danielle from her crazy mother.
 
-Julie Kanfer