Donchaknow, Alec Baldwin was so awesome and open and funny and beloved on Twitter… until the American Airlines thing.
There was a slightly manic quality to it. Baldwin tweeted as if he couldn’t get enough of the hits of instant pleasure you feel when you tap out a tweet that gets a big response. It must have been a lot of work, and it earned him nothing but goodwill in return. Last week, when he found himself in the news for being tossed from an American Airlines flight after an altercation with an attendant, he was hit with a slew of hostile tweets. What had started as an amusement had become something of an addiction, and was now just a pain.
The writer is Jim Windolf and the denial is epic. Not once does Windolf mention the many, many nasty and divisive tweets Baldwin sent out in an effort to insult over half the country who want Obama out of office. Not once does Windolf mention the many Twitter wars Baldwin lost to those who had the temerity to challenge Sir Alec.
But wait, “Vulture’s” revisionist suckupitude gets worse:
Baldwin departed with a sense of drama, a hoofer to the end. His last three tweets comprised links to YouTube videos of Bernard Haitink conducting the Concertgebouworkest through the fourth movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. There is Haitink, in tux and tails, his face bathed in sweat, swinging the baton to steer his players through the melody’s rough sea. Baldwin went out with the Twitter equivalent of a Viking funeral.
No, actually Baldwin retreated like the intellectual and sitcom-stah coward he is. Baldwin ran away to pout after discovering that outside of his Star Waggon, he’s neither worshiped nor equipped to defend his horrible political and social beliefs when challenged in an arena like Twitter where, unlike Hollywood, all men really are created equal.
And then when he was busted cold being an elitist dick to members of the airline working class, he suddenly discovered that without a publicist and sycophant entertainment media outlets like Vulture to protect him from the truth — that people really do think he’s a jerk.
Baldwin didn’t go out like a Viking, he went down like a spoiled punk and then slunk away like the cowardly bad guy he is.