Nicolle Wallace Schools Giuliana Rancic On ‘The View’: You Are No Joan Rivers

TV spent this morning mulling the rude awakening E! Fashion Police cast member Giuliana Rancic got this week when she discovered she cannot pull off Joan Rivers. But, The View’s Nicolle Wallace said it best. By far.

The ABC program was only one of a slew of morning shows to debate whether E! red carpet correspondent Rancic had apologized sufficiently for one of the reviews she gave on Monday’s post-Oscars show. You may have heard one of those so-sorrys Rancic gave yesterday for having said, in re Disney Channel star Zendaya’s dreadlocks at the Oscars, that her hair probably “smells like patchouli oil” or “weed.”

“This isn’t about anything Giuliana said,” Wallace noted, stepping in this morning after the other Ladies of The View chewed on the subject for a while. “This is about [Fashion Police] being a little rudderless without its creator.” That was interesting, because same has been said of The View of late. Most recently, Rosie O’Donnell left the show after less than a season, citing personal reasons, after reports the show was about to exit the other Rosie — Perez. On today’s show, two possible replacements continued their on-air auditions — former What Not To Wear co-host/Vogue fashion editor Stacy London and ESPN’s Samantha Ponder.

“Joan Rivers said things that made me blush at home, alone, in my pajamas. But I would never have expected her to apologize. Because she was Joan Rivers,” Wallace said.

The former GOP communications guru noted Rivers could get away with saying, of Heidi Klum for instance, “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into the oven,” because she had worked hard for decades at being a stand-up comic and “was in her own category.”

Wallace had some free advice for Rancic: “If you have to carry on a show in her tragic absence, you have to understand that you are not Joan. You don’t get to say this stuff and get away with it.”

Rancic had a bad day yesterday when Zendaya scoffed at her snark, and got lots of support around town from the likes of Kerry Washington, Viola Davis and – maybe more important – one of E!’s most important assets, a Kardashian (Khloe). Rancic’s own Fashion Police colleague Kelly Osbourne fired off a passionate, if dubiously spelled, threat to quit the show unless Rancic coughed up something pretty dramatic by way of apologizing:

Rancic had tried to put a lid on the backlash, with this tweet:

No dice, so Rancic’s second, lengthy apology followed, on E! last night:

“As you know, Fashion Police is a show that pokes fun at celebrities in good spirit, but I do understand that something I said last night did cross the line,” Rancic said, looking into the camera on Tuesday. “I just want everyone to know, I didn’t intend to hurt anybody. But I’ve learned it’s not my intent that matters, it’s the result, and the result is that people are offended, including Zendaya, and that is not OK. Therefore, I want to say to Zendaya, and anyone else out there that I have hurt, that I am so, so sincerely sorry. This really has been a learning experience for me.”

Translation: “I’m not Joan Rivers.”