Star struck

Lisa de Moraes delivers a delicious smackdown to Barbara Walters--hereafter to be known as B-Wa--for her behavior after Star Jones unexpectedly announced that she was leaving "The View."

One day after "The View" executive producer Barbara Walters billed and cooed over departing co-host Star Jones Reynolds, she opened the show by sticking a shiv in Star's gullet.

While this is way better TV than that treacly send-off Babs gave her other departing co-host, Meredith Vieira, earlier this month, it's unclear how this advances Babs's carefully constructed image as the Mother Abbess of TV journalism.

"Then there were three," B-Wa said at the top of the show, in re the fact that the tacky kitchen table around which the gals cheep, cheep, cheep at the start of each show was noticeably Star-less, sporting merely the aforementioned B-Wa, Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

"This is truthfully a very difficult day for us and it is a sad day for us," B-Wa continued, her Sad Face now firmly screwed in place.

Difficult and sad because the day before, Star had upstaged what we're certain would have been a riveting Babs-led discussion on air conditioning to announce she was leaving the show on which she had vamped for nine years.

I have only one thing to say about this matter: Didn't Star Jones look better when she was fat?