RAGE MONSTER COVER VANITY FAIR. RAGE MONSTER THREATEN EVERYBODY.

That pretty much sums it up, actually. What’s up with Alec Baldwin lately? It feels like he’s been everywhere, like he’s trying to get some extra attention for something. He brought Hilaria to Cannes and they walked every carpet. Then they took their love to the New York City streets, where Alec left bruised, battered and spit-upon paparazzi in his enraged wake. And now Alec and Hilaria are one – they were married over the weekend. How does all of this equal a Vanity Fair cover? Why does Alec get more attention when he acts like a famewhore and assaults everybody? Why is he still so VIOLENT? Here are the highlights from Alec’s VF piece:

“I thought, I’m probably never going to meet somebody like this again, and so I decided I would get married,” Alec Baldwin, newly hitched (as of this past weekend) to Hilaria Thomas, tells Vanity Fair national editor Todd S. Purdum in our August cover story. “And I am getting married—which is kind of mind-blowing to me.” Baldwin met the yoga instructor early last year at a Manhattan vegan restaurant called Pure Food and Wine, and, although she caught his eye, Thomas apparently wasn’t quite sure who he was. She is, Baldwin tells Purdum proudly, the sort of person who has never seen an episode of 30 Rock.

Baldwin professes a strong desire to go into politics: “I think I do want to go into politics. I really, really do,” he says. “And I don’t know if I will.” Looking at Obama, he imagines the president saying to himself, “‘Wow, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.’ You’ve got to put up with all this sh-t.” Baldwin continues, “If I want to run, run for what? You have to stop and ask a lot of whys. Run for the glory? Run to complete some missing piece of myself? I can keep doing what I’m doing for a living now and be perfectly happy.”

Baldwin, who recently got into an altercation with a Daily News photographer, is the first to admit he’s had a volatile past, acknowledging that he often “gave the Heisman” to people in Hollywood, sometimes “unreasonably” and “childishly.” When Purdum asks Baldwin where he thinks his anger comes from, the actor launches into a long description of the perversity of the industry he works in: “You know, Hollywood does draw some very strange characters, and then the power of Hollywood and what they can do with it becomes like a blood sport to them.” Then he returned to the frustrations and injustices of his child-custody case. He outlined vivid fantasies of the gruesome ways in which he might have murdered his wife’s lawyer (“with a baseball bat”) or Harvey Levin, the TMZ producer who posted the embarrassing voice mail Baldwin left for his daughter: “I wanted to stick a knife in him and gut him and kill him and I wanted him to die breathing his last breath looking into my eyes.

Baldwin’s friend and 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey describes what she’s dubbed his “Irish Negotiating Technique,” which, as she sees it, usually boils down to his saying, “They offered me more money and I told them to go f–k themselves.”

Lorne Michaels, a longtime friend and one of the producers of 30 Rock, puts it this way: “Most people find a way to get to do the thing that is better for them. He doesn’t.”

But Baldwin has come to have a more philosophical approach to his anger. “You have to let that go,” he concludes. “Enough time—I mean, it does heal wounds.” He’s in a better place, for instance, in his famously nasty relationship with ex-wife Kim Basinger: they speak “from time to time” about their daughter, and he describes the contact as “cordial.”

Baldwin tells Purdum that he’d recently asked Mel Gibson to come on his radio podcast—but not in order to discuss Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic outbursts or his rages against his ex-girlfriend. “I said, ‘Mel, this isn’t about regurgitating. You’re one of the greatest movie stars of your generation and you were one of the most successful directors in this business and you won the Academy Award. And the only thing I want to ask you about the travails in your life is: What did you learn?’”

As far as his own learning is concerned, Baldwin details a number of positive lifestyle changes that Thomas has helped him stick to, including maintaining a no-sugar diet since he was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. He also scrupulously avoids alcohol. As a young actor in L.A., Baldwin tells Purdum, he used to drive around with an open bottle of Sauvignon Blanc on ice, even though his father became a non-drinker after struggling with his own alcohol use and cautioned his children that “if we drank excessively or we took drugs or were ever caught with illegal drugs he was going to kick our ass.” A cop pulled him over one scary night: “I don’t remember how high I was and what I was high on,” Baldwin admits, but the incident helped his father’s message finally hit home. At dinner after the Philharmonic with Purdum, Baldwin declines a glass of wine. “Of course I miss it,” he says.

[From Vanity Fair]

What I got from that: 1) Tina Fey continues to be awesome because the only part that made me giggle was “Irish Negotiating Technique”; 2) Alec Baldwin is a crazy rage monster WHILE SOBER; 3) Hilaria Thomas literally has NO IDEA what she just got herself into; and 4) Alec Baldwin is full of hate, rage, violence and nastiness, and like most hyper-aggressive bullies, Alec thinks he’s the one deserving of all of the pity. Ugh. I mean, I’ll still watch 30 Rock, but for the love of God, I’m beginning to really despise Alec.

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.