Hypocrisy and doubletalk: Lessons from Sean Penn

Well, somewhat more so: Sean Penn is, as you said, an actor. He isn't a public figure for any other reason. There are no rallies or donations from progressives to support his idiocy.Trump, on the other hand, enjoys strong political support from many conservatives, so it doesn't seem to be a stretch to draw conclusions about conservatives' values and beliefs based on his statements and the support he enjoys from conservatives. Trump laid out a smorgasbord of fear and hate for conservatives, and they came to dinner hungry.Unless there is a mass movement among progressives to support Penn that I've somehow missed, this specific equivalence does not ring true.

Yes, I recall in 2000 when George Bush was the likely nominee, and it was larks in the spring-time for Democrats. That moron?Trump may be a case of careful what you wish for in the general election. If it's true that the pure products of America go crazy, and I think it is, The American people are perfectly capable of electing a billionaire Bizarro populist who regards them with contempt.I can see why Putin busted his politically-minded oligarchs. This is dangerous stuff.

Pardon the preaching: I've got nowhere else to think out loud about such matters. When I'm not fuming at the Oregon occupiers, here's what I think about in the dark.There are dangerous parallels at work in the world. Both Putin and Trump are ersatz populists, faux macho men of the people who embody and express xenophoic fears and resentments; apprpriately enough, for such revanchist heros, the former hails from the old Soviet intelligence service and the latter from the economic 1% in the U.S., but both hearken to better and stronger authoritarian days.Despite Trump's niceness about innocence before proof, it makes little difference whether Putin or Putin supporters kill and harrass Russian reporters: the killings demonstrate the same fascist will of the leader as Trump supporters when they jeer and rough up protestors while corralling the press.Putin smacked down his oligarchs; ours got Citizens United, yet the American right can't seem to stop gazing fondly at Putin. Odd, that.Meanwhile, back at the Middle East and the American heartland, religious zealots preach against toleration and understanding, diplomacy and peace. ISIS and Al Qaeda, et al., terrorize both the West and their own people to destroy any possible middle ground; the religious right in the U.S. (the seat of right wing power here now) seeks to make all Muslims the enemy, disabusing all Muslims and Americans of any possible middle ground.The American right has met the enemy, and he is them.Muslim refugees crave the civil and material security of the West while retaining religious and cultural contempt for its mores and personal freedoms; the American right trumpets exceptionalist Western freedoms while working to deny them at home. On the one hand, the refugee men who assaulted women holiday revelers in Cologne see these drunken slatterns as legitimate targets; their American counterparts, who would normally think those drunken slatterns invited their abuse had it happened in a frat, instead cite the attacks as evidence of Islam's evil rather than men's failings.Peace is weak, and war is strong: Cruz would go to war over our mis-navigating sailors, as though we'd greet invading Iranian sailors in Maine with clam bakes and hugs, and the successful spiking of an Iranian breeder reactor and the release of U.S. prisoners in Iran without armed conflict is branded as weakness.Peace has been totally pussified on all sides in terms just that laden with animus toward gender and identity differences, within and without.In the meantime, China establishes a military base on an artificial island in the South China Sea and kidnaps Hong Kong citizens, and the demi-god in North Korea enlarges his nuclear stockpile and threatens war. Both Kim and Cruz dream of radioactive landscapes. The U.S. sails carriers close to the Chinese island base and flies a nuclear-capable B-52 over South Korea: Tit, tat, tick, tock: What could go wrong?Underlying these confluences, everywhere we see the rise of fascist impulses. The globe is warming in more than thermal ways, although the deteriorating global climate will certainly make global political chaos even hotter. It's all mad fire, and the madness is being fanned globally in the pursuit of local as much as global power--in the U.S., in the new Soviet Union, in the Middle East, in Asia, in terrorist- and refugee-traumatized Europe.Before the world quite realizes what is happening, self-serving postures can become insane policies; sometimes, when national and factional political and religious leaders play these hot games, things suddenly get real, and we're in the middle of a great big war.That's what I worry about. Edited by Omnivorous, : 1 nuance

You picked badly, yes--a movie star with no political significance or following. Then you equated him with the GOP's leading presidential candidate. Penn's a narcissitic jerk, sure, but I bet he was a jerk before he could spell politics. You imploded your own argument by picking a straw man.So pick again and make your case. I'd recommend a widely supported political figure rather than a wacky actor, if the figure is to exemplify the progressive ethos; better yet, make your case on hypocrisy directly against the progressive ethos with multiple examples. The thread is only dead if you feel you can't make your case at all.And peanut gallery? That's a cheap shot munchBy it, I guess you mean bystanders with no legitimate expectation of an active role in the discussion, as opposed to forum members encouraged to engage. Nobody like that here.