In an interview she conducted with left-wing actor Sean Penn at the Cannes Film Festival that aired on Tuesday, Today co-host Ann Curry behaved like an adoring fan rather than a journalist: "And through all of these years and all these characters....You have trained us to believe you, to believe your transformation, almost instantly. Do you accept that you are one of the greatest actors of our time?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
While discussing Penn's charity work in Haiti, Curry sycophantically proclaimed: "The people who work for you in Haiti have – some of them have called you a demanding boss. You have gotten angry yelling, "That's not good enough!"....Have you always had this moral outrage?"
Sean Penn
By Kyle Drennen | May 23, 2012 | 4:37 PM EDT
By Noel Sheppard | April 23, 2012 | 10:14 PM EDT
Sean Penn on Monday said former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is "anti-American" and "did not read the Constitution."
Rather hysterically, the Oscar-winning actor also told CNN's Piers Morgan, "I am very pro-American in the sense of a Constitutional America" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Rich Noyes | December 30, 2011 | 9:32 AM EST
Back in 2008 and 2009, the Media Research Center’s year-end awards for the Best Notable Quotables were dominated by journalists fawning over the greatness of Barack Obama. In 2008, our winner for “Quote of the Year” was Chris Matthews for his on-air exclamation that upon hearing Obama give a speech, “I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”
By Noel Sheppard | December 19, 2011 | 6:51 PM EST
Last March, Venezuelan raised actress Maria Conchita Alonso wrote a NewsBusters published open letter to Sean Penn in which she scolded the Oscar winner for his ill-informed support of Hugo Chavez.
On Sunday, Alonso had a run-in with Penn at the Los Angeles airport, and as she told Steve Malzberg filling in for Chris Plante on WMAL radio Monday, she ended up calling her foe a "communist a--hole" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary, mild vulgarity warning):
Sean Penn Calls Tea Party the ‘Get the N-Word Out of the White House Party’ Which Wants to ‘Lynch’ Obama
By Brent Baker | October 15, 2011 | 1:39 AM EDT
Left-wing actor Sean Penn slimed the Tea Party as motivated by racism, charging on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight on Friday evening that an impediment to President Obama’s success is “what I call the ‘Get the N-word out of the White House party,’ the Tea Party.”
At a time when Herman Cain tops polls of Republican primary voters, Penn proceeded to allege, without citing any evidence, that “there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, ‘can we just lynch him?’” (video below)
By Otto Juan Reich | June 9, 2011 | 11:16 AM EDT
For some reason, some liberals in Hollywood like to give dictators the benefit of the doubt. Their five-decade support for Fidel Castro’s iron rule over 11 million voiceless Cubans is inexplicable. Their “Blame America First” philosophy has brought them into relationships with some of the worlds most nefarious people – like Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.
This shouldn’t surprise us, Hollywood is a fantasy factory – so it seems that the foreign policy experience of these folks reflects more their career than it does any true understanding of the reality of the governments they so enthusiastically defend. Recently, Hollywood liberals have found a new group of dictators to support. They now heedlessly defend the nouveau authoritarians of South America, like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales.
By Noel Sheppard | June 6, 2011 | 10:51 AM EDT
Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn is a well-known proponent of despots the world over.
On Sunday, he wrote another piece for the Huffington Post extolling the wonder that is Hugo Chavez while asking America to withdraw its recently imposed economic sanctions on Venezuela:
By Matthew Sheffield | March 29, 2011 | 9:43 AM EDT
You might think that given the abysmal box office record of left-wing movies about the Iraq war that "Fair Game," a highly distorted version of the tired controversy surrounding former CIA non-agent Valerie Plame Wilson, would never have been made.
Of course, since Hollywood is dominated by leftists, economic sanity did not prevail. Economic reality did prevail, though, as "Fair Game" ended up being a total bomb. It grossed just $9.5 million domestically. Add in the international ticket sales and the fiction flick just barely managed to recoup its production budget of $22 million.
My source for those numbers of the St. Petersburg Times which still seems to believe the utter fiction that the Plame "disclosure" was the work of the nefarious Bush White House:
By Brad Wilmouth | December 8, 2010 | 5:13 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on CNN’s Parker-Spitzer, rocker Gene Simmons of the rock band KISS and the TV show Family Jewels related to viewers that he is "very conservative" on fiscal and foreign policy issues, voiced his support for President Bush and the war on terrorism - including "nation building" in Iraq - and declared that he wishes he could take back his vote for President Obama from the 2008 election.
As he later explained that he normally does not talk about politics because he believes entertainers are not qualified to speak about such matters, he also took a jab at Hollywood liberal Sean Penn and suggested that politically outspoken celebrities are "morons."
Simmons, who has a history of declaring his love for America because of the rescue of his mother from Nazi concentration camps, also discussed his visit to the house of Holocaust victim Anne Frank and its inclusion in his TV show Family Jewels.
When asked by co-host Kathleen Parker about his support for President Bush and the invasion of Iraq, Simmons revealed some of his voting history:
By Noel Sheppard | December 4, 2010 | 7:19 PM EST
The editorial board of the Washington Post on Saturday ripped to shreds the factual authenticity of the new film about the Valerie Plame affair.
According to the Post, "'Fair Game,' based on books by [Joe] Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions - not to mention outright inventions" (h/t NBer Beresford):
By Lachlan Markay | November 10, 2010 | 2:44 PM EST
The director of the new film "Fair Game" - released Friday - is either blatantly dishonest, or astoundingly lazy. The movie, starring Sean Penn as former U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson and Naomi Watts as his embattled wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, makes a number of claims on controversial issues that are demonstrably false.
The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein did the legwork in demonstrating just how far from the truth some of the film's central claims are. Chief among them, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and other White House officials exerted political pressure on intelligence officials to cherrypick intelligence favorable to claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
By Jeff Poor | October 7, 2010 | 4:21 PM EDT
What is it with Hollywood personalities going to
On Oct. 7, at an appearance at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. promoting her book “You Know I'm Right: More Prosperity, Less Government,” the proudly libertarian co-host of CNBC's “Power Lunch” Michelle Caruso-Cabrera explained how this could happen. She told an audience that Chávez has a very charismatic, yet seductive personality.
“I was telling – my two most interesting interviews I think I’ve ever done are Milton Friedman, very influential on me, and also Hugo Chávez, because when I interviewed him I was struck by how much I like him,” she explained. “He’s very funny. He is so charming. He is smooth. He could be a stand-up comedian. He is a seductor, as I suspect most dictators are – that’s how they get to where they are.”