Sean Penn's Political Science

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie's review of Sean Penn's "All the King's Men" in the usually sad Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes Penn and his performance out to the woodshed. And whacks the hell out of them.

It also unwittingly highlights a larger truth about Penn and his Bush-is-Evil kind. Gillespie catches it perfectly when she writes, "This isn't acting. It's caricature. Instead of Willie Stark, we get Foghorn Leghorn."

Penn plays Willie Stark, but what he is really acting out is his one-dimensional, Foghorn-Leghorn understanding of southern whites. And tellingly, it sounds a lot like his and other liberals' cartoonish ideas about George Bush and Karl Rove. The opening scene, Gillespie tells us, "introduces us to a Willie already in full monster mode — ruthless, dealing dirty and determined to get his way, no matter what, or who, it takes."

Add to this the arrogant accusation that the President is an "idiot," and voila--we have a fair picture of the ideas we hear about Mr. Bush from the likes of Penn, George Clooney, Ted Kennedy, and--in the U.N. just this week--Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The problem is, this idea muddies their thinking and makes them think people like Chavez and Fidel Castro are their "brothers," as actor Danny Glover put it. As Gillespie continues, what she writes about the film's bad story telling identifies why the Bush-bashers seem so thick-headed. After starting with Willie in "full monster mode," she writes, "the movie travels back to five years earlier," and only then do we see Willie in a more favorable light. She continues: "But it's too late. Our head is already too full of what he becomes to take Willie as he once was. This crucial misstep happens at the very start."

I have a friend who began his personal understanding of Bush's "story"--his presidency--the same way. I noticed it just after 9-11. My friend wondered aloud how "Bush and his machine" would "use" what happened to their advantage. My friend, like Penn and many others, began by seeing Bush in "full monster mode." After all, they supposed, Bush had "stolen" the 2000 election. Having framed the President's "story" that way in his mind, he and much of the hostile, often irrational Left have never been able to see anything but this story.

It's too bad. Our countrymen and women are wasting a lot of brain power on trying to see a monster that fits their pre-conceived narrative. They are like the person who sees a ghost because he went to the graveyard expecting (or afraid) to.

But we're not just talking about harmless tricks the mind plays on itself. As I told my friend just after 9-11, my blood boiling, this is not the time for people like him (or Penn, or Chavez, or Chomsky, or....) to prove how smart they are, how much smarter they are than the rest of us because they are thinking "critically," how too smart they are to be "fooled" by the schemes of the "Republican machine." We needed to pull together. How? By trying hard to believe the best about our country. By resisting the cheap gratification and self-congratulations of the pseudo-intellectual's favorite poses: distrust and cynicism. Sure, be skeptical, but not of everything.

And now, back to our movie...