Has-been Hollywood liberal Sean Penn has long had a soft spot for Latin American thugs. From notorious drug kingpin El Chapo to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, the list of tyrannical figures inscribed in Penn’s diary of love really makes one question whether the mediocre actor has suffered a frontal lobe injury that would impair his ability to engage in moral reasoning. Nowhere is Penn’s moral deficiency more apparent than in his friendship with the late Hugo Chavez.
Penn first met the oppressive maniac in 2007 during a trip to Caracas. Following his meet-and-greet, Penn gushed about his encounter with the man he called a “fascinating figure.”
Watch as Penn praises Chavez in an interview with David Letterman. (Note how Penn continues defending Chavez’s brutal dictatorship even as Letterman poses legitimate concerns about the state of affairs in Venezuela).
Since that interview, Penn has called for journalists who criticize the Venezuelan dictator to be jailed.
“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media,” he said in 2010. “There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”
In turn, Chavez praised his “friend” for his pursuit of “truth.”
“I was reading the declarations from our friend Sean Penn, the famous American actor,” Chavez said during a televised rally years ago. “Penn defended what he considers to be the truth.”
When Chavez finally kicked the bucket in 2013, Penn mourned as though he had just lost the mother of his children.
“Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion,” he lamented. “I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chávez and the people of Venezuela. … Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president [Nicolas] Maduro.”
Fast-forward to 2017. The revolution has endured under Nicolas Maduro and the people of Venezuela are dying in desperation. Starving on the streets, Venezuelans have no food, no water, no medicine. The socialist state has failed to ensure basic survival for its people.