Sean Penn: Ted Cruz and Other Tea Partiers in Congress Need To Be Committed By Executive Order

Sean Penn: Ted Cruz and Other Tea Partiers in Congress Need To Be Committed By Executive Order By Noel Sheppard Created 10/29/2013 - 11:11am

Actor and activist Sean Penn said Monday that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) and other Tea Partiers in Congress need to be committed by executive order.

Such was said to a laughing Piers Morgan on the CNN program bearing his name (video follows with transcript and commentary):

SEAN PENN: It is funny, because what you were talking about before we went to the break, you know, I, I was in Port-au-Prince when the shutdown happened. And, and I said to people -- they need, I had stuff that it was demanding on me in Port-au-Prince but I, I had to come home. I said, "Listen I, I have to leave Haiti now because I have to travel to the third world county that I come from."

You have been, you know, this I think, you know, on the forefront of this gun thing. All of these things, and this is also where you get people who think these things.

I think for let's, let's go to the Tea Party influence on Congress on this thing. I think they have, there's a mental health problem in Congress. This would be solved by committing them by executive order, I think, because these our American brothers and sisters. We shouldn't be criticizing them, attacking them. We should take their -- this is a cry for help.

PENN: He's, he's my American brother. I want, we think, we should take care of him. He's in trouble.

PENN: [Laughs] But then you look at, you know, the, look, there's a lot of reason to take a shot at me and I'm giving people a lot reason to over the years. But the thing you're talking about and, and the way people's perception of political positions are, is a direct reaction to their lack of, of their education which is a huge problem that we're dealing with in the country. And between an uneducated people and the solipsism of the people like Ted Cruz and their party, it's a poisonous thing.

So Penn thinks education or the lack thereof is a problem in this country. For a change, I totally agree with him. So let's compare his education to Cruz's.

Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton. He later attended Harvard Law School where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.

Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz recently told Morgan that Cruz was amongst the brightest students he's ever had.

Let's compare that to Penn who according to Hello magazine "dropp[ed] out of Santa Monica College where he had enrolled to study auto mechanics."

As such, given the regular, nonsensical rantings by Penn, I quite agree that his lack of education is a serious problem.

As for other Tea Party members, Penn should take a gander at a recent study finding them more scientifically literate than most in our population.

Alas, since I'm not sure Penn can read or at the very least comprehend what he reads, such might be an exercise in futility.

Sean Penn

•Actor and director
•Member of Not In Our Name and Artists United to Win Without War
•Mentored by Norman Solomon, the Marxist founder of the Institute for Public accuracy
•Has spent huge sums on advertisements criticizing U.S. policies
•Admirer and friend of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

Sean Penn is an “A-list” actor/director who is also an outspoken member of the leftwing Hollywood elite, an adamant critic of Republicans, and a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq.

Penn was born in August 1960 in Los Angeles County, California. His father, Leo Penn, was an actor and director, a supporter of the Hollywood trade unions, and an open communist. Leo was of Spanish descent, and the family’s original surname was “Piñón.” Sean Penn has one brother, Michael, who is a musician. A second brother, actor Chris Penn, died in 2006.

Sean Penn began his acting career in bit-parts on the Little House on the Prairie television series in the 1970s, and his first film role was in the 1981 film Taps. Since that time, Penn’s film projects have often mirrored his political views: In 1989 he starred in the anti-Vietnam war film Casualties of War; in 1996 he played a convicted killer on death row in the anti-capital punishment film Dead Man Walking; and in 2006 he starred in All the King’s Men, a fictionalized account of the radical populist Huey Long. He has received four “Best Actor” Oscar nominations, winning once in 2003 for his role in the film Mystic River.

Renowned for his violent temper, Penn in 1985 was involved in a brutal physical altercation with two British photographers, an incident for which he was fined $100 and given a suspended 90-day jail term. In 1987 he served a six-month jail term in connection with another assault conviction.

Penn has dated folk singer Jewel and actress Susan Sarandon, and in 1985 he married pop star Madonna. In 1989 Penn and Madonna divorced, and thereafter Penn began dating actress Robin Wright. The two married in 1996 and have two children.

Penn is a member of Not In Our Name (a “peace” front for C. Clark Kissinger’s Revolutionary Communist Party) and Artists United to Win Without War. He is also an avid supporter of MoveOn.org. He has spent tens of thousands of dollars on advertisements criticizing the war in Iraq and U.S. foreign policy generally. In an ad that ran in the Washington Post on October 27, 2002, Penn wrote an “Open Letter to the President of the United States of America,” in which he said that the hallmarks of the Bush administration included “intolerance of debate,” “marginalization of your critics,” “the promoting of fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric,” the “manipulation of a quick comfort media,” and the “deconstruction of civil liberties.”

Penn’s Post advertisement led to the development of his friendship with Venezuela’s communist President Hugo Chávez, who has quoted from Penn’s writings in some of his televised speeches. In 2007, for instance, Chávez read aloud from a letter authored by Penn which denounced the War in Iraq and described President Bush and his administration as “villainously and criminally obscene people.” In August 2007, Penn met personally with Chávez in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was commended by the latter for having courageously advocated the impeachment of President Bush. Penn has called Chavez “a fascinating guy” who is “much more positive for Venezuela than he is negative.”

In December 2002, a few weeks after the publication of his aforementioned Washington Post ad, Penn made a much-publicized “fact-finding” visit to Baghdad with Medea Benjamin, founder of Global Exchange and International Occupation Watch. The purpose of the trip, which proved to be of great propaganda value to Saddam Hussein, was to speak out against the seemingly imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq. The trip was organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy, whose Marxist executive director, Norman Solomon, is Penn’s mentor.

In February 2003, Penn accused movie producer Stephen Bing of having fired him from the leading role in the fim Why Men Shouldn’t Marry because of Penn’s vocal opposition to the Iraq War. In Penn’s estimation, Bing had taken a page “from the dark era of Hollywood blacklisting.” Penn filed a $10 million lawsuit against Bing.

In 2005 Penn made a visit to Iran, in the role of correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. He attended prayer ceremonies in Tehran and interviewed Iranian political leaders. In an article he wrote for the Chronicle, Penn commended Iran for remaining relatively unruffled by George W. Bush’s designation of that country as part of the “Axis of Evil.” He furthermore lauded Iran for complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), and warned that “[a]ny reckless action on the part of the United States or Israel may lead to Iran dropping out of the treaty.” Not long thereafter, Iran violated the NNPT by secretly pursuing uranium enrichment, a move that prompted the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution ordering Iran to suspend its nuclear ambitions.

In 2007 Penn was a signatory to a letter to President Bush calling for the normalization of relations with Communist Cuba. The letter, which failed to reference those Cuban artists and dissidents who had been jailed by Fidel Castro’s oppressive regime, stated:

“We write to express our dismay at your [Bush] administration’s continuing hostility towards Cuba. We write to express our opposition to policies that keep us divided from our Cuban counterparts, preventing cultural interchange between our two countries.” Other signatories included such notables as Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Carlos Santana, and Bonnie Raitt.

More...

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1086

In October 2011, Penn appeared on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” program and characterized the Tea Party as a racist movement seeking to “lynch” President Obama. “You have what I call the ‘Get the N-Word Out of the White House Party,’ the Tea Party, this kind of sensibility,” said Penn.

In mid-February 2011, Penn was Hugo Chavez’s guest of honor, serving as keynote speaker at graduation ceremonies for Venezuela’s Salvador Allende Medical School. “Allow me to impart a little anecdote,” said Penn to the enchanted crowd. “I had the privilege to introduce my children to comandante Fidel Castro and as he posed for a photo between them I told him: ‘President, I’ll now be denounced in the U.S. for educating my children as socialist revolutionaries.’” Castro responded: “That’s among the best things that could happen to them.”

In December 2012, Penn traveled to Bolivia to attend a candlelight vigil for the health of the ailing Hugo Chavez. At the vigil, Penn said: “He’s one of the most important forces we’ve had on this planet, and I’ll wish him nothing but that great strength he has shown over and over again. I do it in love, and I do it in gratitude.” When Chavez subsequently died on March 5, 2013, Penn said: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela.”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1086

Actress Confronts Sean Penn Over His Support for Chavez: ‘You Are a Communist A**Hole!’

Dec. 19, 2011

Cuban-born, Venezuelan-raised actress Maria Conchita Alonso and actor Sean Penn had a contentious exchange at Los Angeles International airport recently, in which Alonso called Penn a “communist a**hole” and Penn called Alonso a “pig.”

Over a year and a half after Alonso penned an open letter to Penn asking him why he supports socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the two met up serendipitously (or not so) at LAX while both were waiting to claim lost luggage.

Alonso, who starred alongside Penn in the 1988 film “Colors,” described the exchange to Steve Malzberg on WMAL.

“I go ‘Hello,’ and he smiles and says, ‘Oh, you lost your bag too?” Alonso told Steve Malzberg on WMAL. “And I’m like, ‘No, my mother (lost her bag).’ And at that moment he recognizes me because he didn’t recognize me before, and he goes, ‘Oh, it’s you.’”

Alonso says she calmly told Penn she wanted to speak with him about the tension over Chavez.

“He goes, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. You speak badly about me. You insult me on TV,” Alonso said.

Alonso says the conversation escalated when Penn accused Alonso’s brother of attempting to assassinate Chavez, which Alonso says is not true.

“So I’m like, ‘You are in favor of Hugo Chavez and [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.’ Because I also saw a picture of footage from TV where Chavez and Ahmadinejad are together and Sean Penn is next to them. And, you know, he’s like ‘I’ve never said that about Ahmadinejad. You’re a pig.’ And I go to him, ‘And you are a communist, Sean Penn!’”