Baldwin Wanted Hyde Stoned?
Actor Alec Baldwin may have
meant it as a humorous skit when he railed about stoning Henry Hyde to
death, but even after he apologized and a leading entertainment industry
figure condemned him, the mainstream media never highlighted his
outburst.
On the December 11 Late
Night with Conan O’Brien the NBC host wrapped up his interview with
Baldwin by asking about Clinton’s plight. Baldwin replied:
"They voted on one article of
impeachment already. And I come back from Africa to stained dresses and
cigars and this and impeachment. I am thinking to myself, in other
countries they are laughing at us 24 hours a day and I’m thinking to
myself, if we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us
together, [starts to shout] all of us together would go down to
Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to
death! [crowd cheers] Wait! Shut up! Shut up! No shut up! I’m not
finished. We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their
homes and we’d kill their wives and their children. We would kill their
families. [stands up, yelling] What is happening in this country? What
is happening? UGHHH!"
Cutting to the supposed punch
line, O’Brien then jumped up and put an air mask over Baldwin’s mouth to
calm him down. Now, substitute the name Al Gore or Hillary Clinton for
Henry Hyde and the name of a conservative for Baldwin. What would have
been the reaction from the major networks?
In this case: nothing, not even
after the Washington Post reported that "Baldwin said the
exchange was a parody mocking the sanctimony of representatives...and
that he was sorry Hyde took it badly. ‘In the current supercharged
climate there’s no room for this kind of glibness,’ he said."A December
21 Post item by TV columnist Lisa de Moraes relayed how Jack Valenti,
President of the Motion Picture Association of America, wrote Baldwin:
"However it was said it’s not something you use as a joke, it’s not
something you parody. This is incendiary."
FNC’s Special Report with
Brit Hume played a RealPlayer clip of it from the MRC Web page and
Rush Limbaugh alerted his listeners. After the December 20 Fox News
Sunday showed an excerpt of Baldwin’s outburst, Brit Hume observed:
"I think it was not in earnest. On the other hand, I don’t think the
thought would have occurred to him to say it on that show if it hadn’t
occurred to him otherwise."
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