Actor Alec Baldwin confirmed with the Gothamist that he will not be returning to MSNBC. In typical Baldwin fashion, the actor raged against those who he sees as his oppressors: the celebrity site TMZ and those he describes — Andrew Sullivan and GLAAD’s Rich Ferraro — as being part of the “fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy”:
Showing a video in which I call someone a ‘cocksucking something’… you can’t really tell what I’m saying, and we live in a world in which the phrase ‘TMZ’s enhanced audio’ exists. ‘TMZ’s enhanced audio.’ And then with The Post… there’s nothing you can do when you get thrown in this washing machine, nothing. You know? Nothing. All you end up doing is just defending yourself all day long.
Martin Bashir’s on the air, and he made his comment on the air! I dispute half the comment I made… if I called him ‘cocksucking maggot’ or a ‘cocksucking motherfucker’… ‘faggot’ is not the word that came out of my mouth. That I know. But you’ve got the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy–Rich Ferraro and Andrew Sullivan–they’re out there, they’ve got you. Rich Ferraro, this is probably one of his greatest triumphs. They killed my show. And I have to take some responsibility for that myself.
Baldwin makes a good point regarding Martin Bashir. Screaming something on the street in anger as Baldwin did is not even in the same arena as Bashir spewing his grotesque madness at Governor Sarah Palin over the MSNBC airwaves with prepared remarks. Bashir apologized, and sounded sincere, but so did Baldwin. And an apology is usually only one part of what happens after doing such a thing. There should still be consequences.
Baldwin dug his own grave. This is the second time this year Baldwin was caught red-handed spewing anti-gay slurs. There was just no way a left-wing news outlet like MSNBC could hang on to Baldwin without looking wildly hypocritical as they attack conservatives as racist for using words like “Chicago.”
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