I know the jury’s still out on this one, but until the entire story is out, I’m giving Alec Baldwin the benefit of the doubt. Sure, it’s not the best idea in the world to call your 11-year-old daughter and leave a message on her voicemail calling her a “filthy pig,” but who really knows why he said that? Who really and truly knows what she did? Maybe she’s a spoiled little brat who acts like trash and stomps her feet when her iPod isn’t working or she can’t find her cell phone or her $300 flip-flops. I’ve known people like that. I’ve dealt with them. The most horrible person I have ever met in my entire life was a little California creature who worked for a movie company and stomped around in her pink miniskirt shouting and screaming at people twice her age. I came very close to calling her a filthy pig. The best part about the whole Alec episode is that, because we live in the United States, it got more attention the day the voicemail was made public than the war in Iraq did. I actually saw a segment on the news with the network’s top legal analyst — no, maybe it was the top Court TV reporter, which is even better — analyzing it like it was a serial killing. He was fervent in his opinion about it. He really thought it was interesting and horrible and he really cared about it. He was nearly foaming at the mouth about it as much as everyone did when Don Imus made his racist remarks. And what a shocker that one was. Don Imus is, was, and always has been simply grotesque and reptilian. I can’t believe people were surprised that he said what he said. And his mock apology was priceless because it was about as sincere as George Bush saying that we are winning the aforementioned war in Iraq. It was almost as good as watching Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez trying to answer questions about the firings of all those U.S. attorneys. Do we really think we’re safe with an attorney general who can’t remember what he did two days ago? We already went down that road with Ronald Reagan and it got us in the Iran-Contra mess. Not to mention a funeral that lasted longer than his presidency. At least the exhaustive coverage of the Alec Baldwin Phone Message took up enough airtime that it ate into (no pun intended) those commercials for the NutriSystem diet plan. You know, the one that comes on every seven seconds, no matter what channel you’re surfing through. The one with the woman who sounds like she’s from Millington and says, “My husband sayad I was haaawt.” I want to kill that woman, along with the one who actually says the words, “I have had this smoking-hot body since I was in college.” They both need to be thrown into a pit full of rabid porcupines, as do the makers of those commercials and the person responsible for having them on the air so often. They are worse than the “apply it directly to your forehead” ads, for which I hope someone went to prison. I say, let Alec Baldwin and Don Imus say whatever they want as long as those commercials continue to be allowed on the air. One minute you’re watching grieving parents and students after the murders at Virginia Tech and if you look away for one second there’s some hick in a bikini talking about how great she looks. Is there no balance in life? Should Alec Baldwin leaving a nasty voicemail message garner more interest from the U.S. mass media than, say, the fact that people are still living in tents almost two years after Hurricane Katrina because we have the most corrupt government and insurance industry in the civilized world? Oh, I forgot: Covering that would mean work and would not include a celebrity, so fuggetabouddit. Maybe if Alec Baldwin decides to go into rehab to keep his career intact, he will do it in Darfur so someone will have to go over there and show us what’s really happening.
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