During my regular morning browse of the beloved Internet Movie Database -- which, to my shame, can sometimes include a glancing stroll through the movie celebrity news, courtesy of WENN -- I noticed a story headlined, "Penn Defends South American Connections".
Intrigued, I read on. (It is the mysterious alchemy of these articles that they manage to be incredibly condensed, and possess a profound lack of content, yet compell me to follow through.) It seems that Mr. Penn has been taking fire from a writer for The Advocate. This writer, a mister James Kirchick, believes that Penn's association with people like Hugo Chávez and Raul Castro serves to discredit any positive fallout that might result from his reportedly excellent performance as assassinated gay politician Harvey Milk.
The allegations are intriguing (though not in the way the writer intends). Still more intriguing is the way the unidentified WENN correspondant sees fit to blithely call Penn "a longtime supporter of Venezuelan dictator Chávez".
Perhaps I'm not drinking enough of my New York Times/Wall Street Journal Kool-Aid, but when exactly did the (repeatedly) democratically elected leader of Venezuela become a dictator? Is this just a case of, "If we say it enough, it will be so"?
