Pretty much every media outlet lauds Sean Penn for his performance in “Milk” while scrupulously avoiding to ask him any tough questions about the public love he continues to shower upon dictators Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Raul Castro. Shouldn’t someone in the media take the time to at least ask him why he thinks these thugs are such great guys and whether their track record of human rights abuses is at odds with his claim as a protector of such rights? Well, someone finally has, The Advocate.

The same week that Milk premiered in theaters, The Nation published a cover story by Penn based on interviews he conducted recently with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, the dictators of Venezuela and Cuba respectively. The article is a love letter to the two men, defending them against all manner of Western “propaganda.” It hearkens back to the notorious dispatches penned by Westerners fresh from the Soviet Union who reported on the amazing progress of the workers’ paradise. These worshipful epistles, often published in The Nation, neglected to mention anything about the gulag, the “disappearance” of political dissidents, the Ukrainian famine, or any other such inconvenient truths about communism. Lenin termed the individuals who delivered these apologetics “useful idiots,” and Penn and his enablers are nothing if not that.

Not surprisingly, not everyone in the gay community sees as clearly as the writer of this piece, but it’s a start and perhaps a few people in the mainstream media (as Patrick Goldstein did in his column) might consider following suit.

h/t: Patrick Goldstein, LA Times

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 1:20 pm by Insider and is filed under Loons, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.