This is your brain on Hope

Sean Penn attempts to write a political essay, and in the process manages to make Keith Olbermann seem rational and coherent. A few excerpts:

At the DNC, I absorbed the intense hope, passion, and readiness to participate in, and sacrifice for our country.

Sean, I was in Denver. I wasn't hanging around the exclusive catered invitation-only VIP parties you were at, but I was there. What I saw was mainly a passionate cluelessness stirred to occasional heights of frenzied foolishness by the cynical and corrupt leaders of the Democratic Party. But whatever.

The picture of Republicanism in America represented by their convention, seemed more a gathering of self-styled pseudo-cowboys and shallow-eyed Stepford wives, than one of a hearty and loyal opposition.

In contrast to the honest and authentic people you snort coke with in Hollywood, Sean?

Full disclosure, I've spent a lot of time in Wasilla, Alaska, where she was mayor. . . . It's a beautiful town in a beautiful state. But, it's smaller than my children's pre-school.

You send your kids to a pre-school with an enrollment of 5,500, Sean?

Our republican-led nation did a great disservice to the young soldiers who were sent to fight in Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, president from 1963-69. Maybe you should look him up.

Captain John McCain was shot down during Operation Rolling Thunder over Vietnam. . . . An estimated 52,000 Vietnamese civilians - -men, women, and children, were incinerated as a result of Rolling Thunder's bombardment.

Your commie father Leo would be proud to know you're still pushing Red propaganda, Sean.

Palin, married to an 8-year secessionist, has as much as admitted that she has no interest whatsoever in any culture but her own. It is that kind of lacking in basic curiosity and the void of insightfulness that comes with it which embodied George Bush's folksy failings.

Sean Penn has never met Sarah Palin's husband and yet brands Todd Palin a "secessionist" -- a commie questioning someone's patriotism, that's rich! And Penn, who rambles on for 1,700 words without actually making a point, describes Sarah Palin as "lacking in basic curiosity and the void of insightfulness."

Sean, your old man was a subversive stooge for Joe Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in human history. The total number killed in Iraq since 2003 is not equal to a month's toll in the terror-famine Stalin imposed on the Ukraine, and Guantanamo Bay is Club Med compared to Stalin's gulags. When you show some "curiosity" and "insightfulness" about what Communism was, and why your father's support and defense of Stalinism was a complete betrayal of the humanism you claim to cherish, maybe the rest of us will take you seriously. Instead, you're projecting your insecurities on others and engaging in a misguided crypto-Freudian effort to vindicate your father's folly.