Hey Sean, Put Down Your Pen

Sean Penn may be “the finest character actor around,” but he's “no journalist,” writes Roger Cohen in the New York Times. Penn’s recent “fawning tributes” to Cuban president Raúl Castro show the actor has “delusional, dangerous” beliefs about the dictator—a fact that “Penn as Harvey Milk gets,” while “Penn the foreign correspondent flails.”

It’s hard to believe Penn, who gave a “breathtaking, powerful” performance as gay rights activist Milk, would be taken in by “a dictator presiding over a 50-year-old revolution that once dispatched gays to labor camps to correct their ‘counterrevolutionary tendencies.’” The actor doesn’t seem to grasp that Milk “is precisely about the sort of grass-roots political movement that would be impossible in the Cuba of the Castro brothers.” (More Sean Penn stories.)