Alec Baldwin’s Parenting Skills

So here's the latest celebrity outburst caught on tape and propagated by the stand-ups gents at TMZ:

An enraged Alec Baldwin unleashed a volcanic tirade of threats and insults on his 11-year-old daughter, Ireland, calling her a "thoughtless little pig," and bashing her mother Kim Basinger — and TMZ has obtained the whole thing unfiltered and raw. And we've learned, a family law judge was so alarmed after hearing the tape, she has temporarily barred Baldwin from having any contact with his child.

You can listen to the voicemail here.

I have to say, this sounds like Christmastime around the old Weiss hearth. My respect for Baldwin just took a trip to the North Counties after hearing him lose it in a way that's got me nostalgic for my insufferable preteen years. It's clear from his tone and his explanation that he's a taxed papa justifiably dealing with a spoiled brat of a child, who's acting in accordance with the nasty caprices of her manipulative mother. He shouldn't have referred to Basinger's shortcomings to his daughter, but still… From what I gather about Kim, pumpkin's sure to have hipped to them by now anyway.

That this voicemail — conveniently leaked by Basinger to the press: there's good parenting for you — is being cited as Exhibit A for placing a ban on Baldwin's visitation rights shows just how ridiculously overprotective and cossetting the culture has become. (People who tell me, "Oh, I don't hit my kids" might as well say, "Next up: Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq.")

For those from households governed strictly by the precepts of Voltaire, allow me to lend a little "context": Alec's a Long Islander — Queens, where I'm from, is technically Long Island — and he was no doubt reared in that ethnically fungible lexicon of Id-Speak one is likely to encounter on the terminal moraine. No matter what you make of yourself, no matter how you trundle and grope your way to the cosmopolitan riches of the Big City, you'll never have to go home again because you'll never shake your native patois in moments of high agita. Jewish, Irish, Polish, German: No one gets away clean. You think I exaggerate? My shiksa mother to my Ashkenazi father: "Fuck you in your Dead Sea ass." (They were divorced, rather mercifully, when I was two.)

If anything, Baldwin's demonstrated what years on the fey West Coast will do to a good Atlantic verbal blast furnace. The poor boy's turned a featherweight.

Check in with me again the next time I knock over a piece of Mom's Lladro.