Alec Baldwin’s personal attacks and self-pity in his New York magazine piece are just the “latest installment in the saga of a brilliant comic actor felled by his extreme temper,” one of his prime targets said Monday.
Andrew Sullivan — the blogger derided by Baldwin as a member of the “Gay Department of Justice” — said the hotheaded “30 Rock” star offered “the classic non-apology apology” for his repeated homophobic slurs by claiming, “If I’ve offended anyone along the way, I do apologize.”
Sullivan, who is gay, also dismissed Baldwin’s professed desire to abandon New York for Los Angeles as an empty threat.
“And, of course, after a non-apology will come a non-exit from public life,” Sullivan wrote on his blog, The Dish.
In the cover story, Baldwin (pictured Monday) said being accused of unleashing a homophobic rant against a Post photographer last year had left him “bitter, defensive, and more misanthropic than I care to admit.”
“Look, I work in show business. I am awash in gay people, as colleagues and as friends,” Baldwin said in the piece.
In addition to attacking Sullivan and CNN’s Anderson Cooper — the latter as “the self-appointed Jack Valenti of gay media culture” — Baldwin blasted MSNBC for canceling his low-rated talk show, “Up Late.”
He labeled MSNBC host Rachel Maddow a “phony” who engineered his firing.
Maddow responded Monday.
“I have never met Mr. Baldwin, either on-camera or off-camera. I wish him all the best,” she said in the only statement released by MSNBC.
Fellow ex-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann defended Baldwin, tweeting sympathetically that “film/entertainment stars are the last group media can abuse, even stalk, with impunity.”
NYPD sources said they’d be glad to see Baldwin leave town.
“I don’t like the guy. It’s a pain in the ass to deal with him every time he blows his top at the press and we’re called in to clean up the mess,” said one source who knows Baldwin from the actor’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.
“Law & Order” star Ice-T advised Baldwin to stay in the Big Apple because moving to LA would expose him to more paparazzi than he could imagine.
“They’re coming after him, and that’s not a battle I think he can win,” said the rapper, who hosts the podcast “Final Level.”
At the Upper West Side Starbucks where Baldwin infamously called a male barista an “uptight queen” on Twitter, a worker said managers use his 2011 meltdown as a lesson on how to handle cranky celebs.
“I guess Alec Baldwin is like a diva who needs to let everyone know he’s there,” the worker said. “If he wants to leave, that’s fine with me.”
Additional reporting by Frank Rosario