Entertainingly snotty, although if you can’t spare five minutes for the whole thing, here’s a precis courtesy of one of our commenters: “Boo Hoo, I’m rich and famous and people want to take my picture, so I yell at them, and the gays don’t like me anymore. And after all I’ve done for them! So I’m going to move to LA and live behind a gate like all the other actors.” Right. Plus, we learn that Shia LaBeouf’s just as irritating as we all thought.

On the one hand, how seriously should we take a guy who could write a sentence like this in all apparent earnestness?

“[Martin] Bashir brought a depth of experience and polish that I imagined might help get MSNBC to a higher place, content-wise”

Bashir was the network’s bottom-feeder, a guy who occasionally waded into depths of nastiness that even other MSNBC hosts would avoid precisely because he didn’t have much to offer content-wise. He wasn’t the smartest liberal on the network, he certainly wasn’t the liberal with the most Beltway experience, so apparently he resolved to be the meanest. Eventually he waded a little too far and drowned. If Bashir was Baldwin’s Great Highbrow Hope, whom does he consider lowbrow?

On the other hand, the piece does come highly recommended from another guy with a knack for making enemies:

One word he uses I can't endorse. The rest is perfect: @NYMag This week's cover story: A candid first-perso… http://t.co/hEsK1kqtbE

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 24, 2014

Here’s the good stuff. Note that this isn’t the first time that someone close to MSNBC has accused Rachel Maddow of basically running the network. One of Eliana Johnson’s sources told her the same thing last month. That was dismissed at the time by lefties as conservative hyperbole designed to pin the egregious nastiness of other MSNBC hosts on its biggest star, but now here’s Baldwin relaying a comment to the same effect:

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…

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…

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? Arianna Huffington accomplished what she wanted to accomplish. She created this wonderful thing. And what have they done with that? They want clicks, I get it. They’ve gotta have clicks for their advertisers, so they’re going to need as much Kim Kardashian and wardrobe malfunctions as possible. The other day, they had a thing on the home page about pimples. Tripe. Liberal and conservative media are now precisely equivalent…

[T]his is Roger Ailes. And Fox. And Breitbart. And this is all about hate. It’s Hate Incorporated. But the liberals have taken the bait and run in the same direction—and it’s just as corrosive. MSNBC, in its own way, is as full of shit, as redundant and as superfluous, as Fox.

That’s the second liberal celebrity in four days to attack MSNBC for becoming as stupid and sensationalist as their worst caricatures of Fox. Bill Maher called Maddow out to her face on Friday night over the network’s weird obsession with Christie’s Bridgegate scandal. (Actual quote: “If it was a Democratic governor not close to New York City, the media capital, would we be talking about it?”) It’s interesting that the Maddow era, which was supposed to be a wonky low-key alternative to the scenery-chewing days of Olbermania, is beset by so many controversies — hosts flying off the handle, reporters hyperventilating over minor scandals, people getting suspended and even fired. Second look at Olby?