Taking to the pages of New York Magazine, Alec Bladwin has spoken at length, attempting to justify his nasty use of anti-gay slurs when angry, and dump on MSNBC which fired him in the wake of a backlash from the powerful gay lobby. He wants people to know that he isn't really a gay-hater despite the words that come out of his mouth in unguarded moments. And he makes a promise he will have a very hard time keeping: "this is the last time I'm going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again."

We should be so lucky.

The very long piece is frankly tedious, the ramblings of a confused, angry man who is not nearly as intelligent as he assumes himself to be. But in his anger he lets fly a few interesting put-downs and self-justifications., So, to save you the trouble and tedium, here is what you might want to read. Note of caution: Baldwin has a potty mouth and I have left in his vulgarisms verbatim.

I watched MSNBC, prior to working there, very sporadically. Once I had signed a contract with them, I wanted to see more of what they were about. It turned out to be the same shit all day long. The only difference was who was actually pulling off whatever act they had come up with. Morning Joe was boring. Scarborough is neither eloquent nor funny. And merely cranky doesn't always work well in the morning. Mika B. is the Margaret Dumont of cable news. I liked Chris Jansing a lot. Very straightforward. I like Lawrence O'Donnell, but he's too smart to be doing that show. Rachel Maddow is Rachel Maddow, the ultimate wonk/dweeb who got a show, polished it, made it her own. She's talented. The problem with everybody on MSNBC is none of them are funny, although that doesn't prevent them from trying to be. (snip)

 I ended up attacking a reporter who wrote in the Daily Mail online that my wife was tweeting from Jimmy's [Gandolfini] funeral. He was wrong-in fact, at a later time, she had retweeted items whose original time code matched the time of the funeral.

In my rage, however, I called him a "toxic little queen," and, thus, Anderson Cooper, the self-appointed Jack Valenti of gay media culture, suggested I should be "vilified," in his words. I didn't feel bad about the incident. He lied about my wife. They say this is what comes with stardom-I don't agree with you. A journalist isn't supposed to write a lie about you. If he was in New York, I might have had the impulse to beat the shit out of the guy. At the time, I didn't view "toxic little queen" as a homophobic statement. I didn't realize how those words could give offense, and I'm sorry for that. (snip)

Harvey Levin exists in his own universe. He's this kind of cretinous barnacle on the press. Levin told the world that that muffled sound on the video-Levin wanted everyone to know he knows what it is. You don't know, and I don't know, but Levin knows, and he tells the world that it's "faggot."

I get angry, and I've said all sorts of things in anger, but I'd never use that word. Levin has so little regard for the truth, which is odd, knowing he was once a legal correspondent for the CBS affiliate in L.A. He's also the one who revealed the tape that my ex-wife's lawyers provided of me yelling at my daughter seven years ago. Knowing that none of it would have transpired if I hadn't left the message in the first place, I think he hurt my daughter more than anyone.

In the recent video, you see me completely riled up and going after this guy and you hear me saying "cocksucker" and then some bisyllabic word that sounds like "faggot"-but wasn't. Still, it doesn't matter. glaad comes after me and Anderson Cooper comes after me and Andrew Sullivan comes after me, all maintaining that I'm a hateful homophobe. All based on what Harvey Levin told them. (snip)

...I'd go see [MSNBC president] Phil [Griffin] and I'd say, "What are the ratings?" If I had 15 meetings with Phil Griffin, 5 of them were after the show, with me saying, "What do you make of these ratings?" He'd say, "Don't worry. It takes time." (We beat Cooper two of three Fridays at ten.) Although he appeared to have some buyer's remorse, he told me to hang in there. After the TMZ event, he said, "Don't worry. I have to suspend you. But this will blow over." I have all the emails to prove it. And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, MSNBC said, "You're fired."

Once they fired me, a former MSNBC employee I knew emailed me. He said, "You watch now, Phil is going to start leaking left and right to bury you." When I left, "Page Six" was flooded with lies about me. Another told me, regarding the "toxic little queen" comment, that Rachel Maddow was the prime mover in my firing, as she was aghast that I had been hired and viewed me as equivalent to Mel Gibson. Another source told me, "You know who's going to get you fired, don't you? Rachel. Phil will do whatever Rachel tells him to do." I think Rachel Maddow is quite good at what she does. I also think she's a phony who doesn't have the same passion for the truth off-camera that she seems to have on the air.

They invoked a morals clause and refused to pay my contract. Later, when Martin Bashir resigned, I was disappointed. Bashir brought a depth of experience and polish that I imagined might help get MSNBC to a higher place, content-wise, in spite of Griffin. (snip)

When 30 Rockwent into syndication, I sensed that I was going to be on TV for a bit, so I crafted my arrangement with Capital One Bank to fund my foundation for charitable giving. They paid me $15 million over nearly five years. After taxes and accounting fees, I will have given all of it, $14.125 million, to charity. After the TMZ event, Capital One did not renew my contract, although it politely said the two things were unrelated. AT&T had booked me for a paid speech in Orlando-and then canceled. WNYC lost funding for my radio show. Bill de Blasio, who apparently gets his news from TMZ, too, distanced himself from me.

Now I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible. I used to engage with the media knowing that some of it would be adversarial, but now it's superfluous at best and toxic at its worst. If MSNBC went off the air tomorrow, what difference would it make? If the Huffington Post went out of business tomorrow, what difference would it make?

Buh-bye, Alec.