Actor and activist Sean Penn said Monday that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) and other Tea Partiers in Congress need to be committed by executive order.
Such was said to a laughing Piers Morgan on the CNN program bearing his name (video follows with transcript and commentary):
SEAN PENN: It is funny, because what you were talking about before we went to the break, you know, I, I was in Port-au-Prince when the shutdown happened. And, and I said to people -- they need, I had stuff that it was demanding on me in Port-au-Prince but I, I had to come home. I said, "Listen I, I have to leave Haiti now because I have to travel to the third world county that I come from."
PIERS MORGAN, HOST: [Laughs]
You have been, you know, this I think, you know, on the forefront of this gun thing. All of these things, and this is also where you get people who think these things.
I think for let's, let's go to the Tea Party influence on Congress on this thing. I think they have, there's a mental health problem in Congress. This would be solved by committing them by executive order, I think, because these our American brothers and sisters. We shouldn't be criticizing them, attacking them. We should take their -- this is a cry for help.
PIERS MORGAN, HOST: You literally commit what ...
PENN: I think ...
MORGAN: ... people like Ted Cruz?
PENN: He's, he's my American brother. I want, we think, we should take care of him. He's in trouble.
MORGAN: [Laughs] Well, actually have him committed.
PENN: Yeah, I thinks it's a good idea.
MORGAN: [Laughs]
PENN: [Laughs] But then you look at, you know, the, look, there's a lot of reason to take a shot at me and I'm giving people a lot reason to over the years. But the thing you're talking about and, and the way people's perception of political positions are, is a direct reaction to their lack of, of their education which is a huge problem that we're dealing with in the country. And between an uneducated people and the solipsism of the people like Ted Cruz and their party, it's a poisonous thing.
So Penn thinks education or the lack thereof is a problem in this country. For a change, I totally agree with him. So let's compare his education to Cruz's.
Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton. He later attended Harvard Law School where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.
Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz recently told Morgan that Cruz was amongst the brightest students he's ever had.
Let's compare that to Penn who according to Hello magazine "dropp[ed] out of Santa Monica College where he had enrolled to study auto mechanics."
As such, given the regular, nonsensical rantings by Penn, I quite agree that his lack of education is a serious problem.
As for other Tea Party members, Penn should take a gander at a recent study finding them more scientifically literate than most in our population.
Alas, since I'm not sure Penn can read or at the very least comprehend what he reads, such might be an exercise in futility.
(HT Weasel Zippers)
