by Kate Ward - Entertainment Weekly
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) might be the protest du jour, but that doesn’t mean that Tea Partiers have been cut completely from the political conversation. Appearing on Piers Morgan Tonight, Sean Penn addressed the conservative movement, which has been regularly compared to the left-leaning OWS. But the actor might have just ended up occupying Tea Partiers’ ire. “There’s another problem,” he told Morgan. “You have what I call the ‘Get the N-word out of the White House party,’ The Tea Party.”
When Morgan told the actor that fellow thespian Morgan Freeman had also made claims that the Tea Party was racist against President Obama (“Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term,” the actor said in September. “What underlines that?”), Penn responded, “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. If you ask a representative of the Tea Party, ‘Okay, social security, socialists, get rid of it?’ They’re going to get very confused. At the end of the day, there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, ‘Can we just lynch him?’”