I’ve just been “watching” the convention on Twitter. It’s more fun that way. I’ll probably amble over to a television set at some point. At least tonight people are talking about Mitt Romney instead of themselves. That could be progress. So, what are your impressions so far? Are you almost ready to wake up tomorrow, drive over to Romney headquarters, and volunteer?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
A parade on the stage of all the African-Americans and Latinos that will vote for Mitt in November.
More minorities at the podium than in the entire crowd.
Clint got a new face — nipped, tucked, and botoxed twenty years off his 82 year old one.
I’m a little more bummed about his speaking role than I ought to be. Love the guy.
But his voice, neck, and brain are an elderly 82.
GOP has found its replacement for Charlton Heston.
I thought he was the replacement (or the closest thing available) for Ronald Reagan?….
Romney snagged the Reagan part but he’s doing it very badly. Not that Reagan, Heston, Arnold or Eastwood had/have great acting chops. Eastwood would have been a better movie maker if he’d stayed behind the camera for the past few decades.
The whole Clint Eastwood thing was just sad.
Rich Lowry on Twitter tonight: “Eastwood performance will break through by the sheer force of its utter bizareness”
Sure…go with that. LOL!!
What the fuck happened? I go to pick a boy up from work and Clint Eastwood suffers epic fail?
Daily Kos has it up already.
I can’t watch – just makes me sad. Eastwood is a frigging legend. For him to humiliate himself during prime time television, well… it’s just another thing the GOP ruined.
I agree – I didn’t watch the Eastwood video either. I just watched the response, and that was enough for me.
Well…yeah!!! You mean the mainstream media response, right? Of course. That’s all you need to watch to know how well a given attempt is going to go over with the media-led, “undecided” sheeple. And who else really counts in this election? The various well preached-to choirs like the leftiness and rightiness brigades? Please. Had the same actor run a similar game at the Dem convention with an empty suit on a hangar do you really think that the media response would have been the same?
I don’t.
AG
Arthur…tell me the truth…I respect your opinion…
Eastwood made fun of the most Powerful Person in the World…and there is nothing the most Powerful Person in the World can do about it!!!
Isn’t that one of the things that makes America great?
Yes. That is one of the things that has made America great.
And if the right wing continues in the direction that it has been going for the last several years and someone like Mitt Romney or…eventually, bet on it…Paul Ryan becomes president during stressful times, there will be “something that can be done about it.” It won’t be pretty, either.
Remember Lenny Bruce’s classic line, please:
“If you can’t say fuck, you can’t say ‘fuck the government.’ ”
Watch.
AG
I just watched it and I liked it.
Obviously, I don’t agree with Clint. But I thought he was funny. I didn’t think he was addled at all. Yes, it was different, and the “go fuck yourself” jokes weren’t apt in the case of the president, but it got laughs.
Maybe it’s because I just like and respect Clint Eastwood, but I don’t think he humiliated himself at all beyond the mere fact that he’s misguided.
I didn’t want to watch it because I hate knowing actors that I like as actors are crazy. I can’t even watch Braveheart anymore.
But after your comment, I went and watched it. And yeah, I don’t see what the big deal is.
Really, Boo? Even Roger Ebert(yeah, he’s a liberal .. but he’s also plugged in .. in Hollywood) said that it was sad spectacle. About the only worthwhile thing in his whole “speech” was that he mentioned Guantanamo not being closed.
And that we should bring our troops home from Afghanistan tomorrow.
But that we a.) shouldn’t use federal courts to close Guantanamo, and b.) I support Romney who wants us to stay there indefinitely.
You liked a rambling, sophomoric skit that essentially had the President saying “Go f… yourself?”
The audience cheering this inappropriate garbage has the same mentality as the debate audience in SC that cheered about people dying due to lack of health care insurance.
I like and respect Clint as well. He was barely stringing together coherent sentences; sometimes he wasn’t even doing that. It was an unconventional premise, and needed a good performance to pull it off, and the Oscar-winner gave a performance extraordinarily unsuited to the task.
Me too.
He didn’t “humiliate” himself. That’s just a mainstream fixer talking point. He did a good, professional job of acting and he played the semi-live crowd very well. The writing was clever and his timing was impeccable. He’s on a losing side, and that may be a fault, but other than that…he backed up what he believes. Given his age and the decades of his greatest fame, he reached the target crowd. Were there “undecideds” in the TV audience that were moved to vote for Romney by Eastwood’s performance? Probably. How many? We shall see soon enough.
Romney’s no Truman, but Ryan is. He’s a scrapper. And Obama is looking more and more like the smug little man on the wedding cake. If he doesn’t soon get down and dirty with these people…and y’know, we’ve been waiting four years for him to do so…he may stay so far above the fray that he loses it. Then things would really get “real” around here.
May you be born(e) into interesting times.
AG
Clint talked listlessly and mostly incoherently to an empty chair which was supposed to represent the President.
It was much worse than you’d think, given that description. Swear to God.
Wrong!!! It was f-ing hilarious!!!
Your’re inability to see the humor is why you are going to lose this election!
A lot of people think it was a prank. They say that Eastwood was playing a character similar to the one in Gran Torino. I never saw the movie. Anyone here agree?
Rubio — Americans are special because we put our trust in god and not the government.
emptywheel fact check: ” Historic levels of filibusters.”
Bigger whopper than Lyin’ Ryan? If yes, drink.
Why do I feel Romney is a hypocrite? It is so difficult to listen this man, even W was better speaker.
Your points are diametrically opposed in their accuracy…
He’s definitely NOT a hypocrite…he is certainly a man without pretense…he is who he is…dead wrong there…
But he is hard to listen to…dead right on that one…
Speaking of diametrically opposed…
What are Romney’s positions?
For the poor: Missionary
For the rich: 69
The horrible thing is that if Romney does manage to get elected with 50.0001% of the vote, he really will reap the political benefit of the incipient recovery.
This speech by Romney is just about the most lame thing in the history of political speech-making. Who the hell wrote this thing? It is a hodge-podge of disconnected thoughts and non-sequiturs.
Finally…..the required “god bless” bullshit. And it’s over.
Sorry folks, only one stretching of the truth in all that vagueness. Nowhere near Ryan’s lie-a-thon.
Saved the booze on that one.
Well…I wish Ryan was on the top of the ticket…
Sigh…
I guess we’ll have to rely on a massive counter attack on the airwaves to win this thing…
Believe me, so do I.
You know, I’ve seen your comments here and have only just come to realize the thoroughness of your deadpan satire. Really well-played.
At least tonight people are talking about Mitt Romney instead of themselves.
You wish!! Willard even gets upstaged on his big night by Dirty Harry and a chair.
Indeed. Romney seemed like an afterthought throughout the whole three days, didn’t he? And what is the biggest twitter-thing from the last night? Not his speech; hell no — a big brouhaha over Eastwood and whether he made people’s day or embarrassed himself.
If these people can’t even run a convention effectively, how are they going to run a country?
FWIW, I turned off the sound halfway through Mitt’s speech and went off to do other things. And I’m a person who always watches the speeches.
I think the only thing people will remember from tonight is Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair.
Wow Oh Shit Wolf Blitzer is MAD about Clint Eastwood and he ain’t letting the GOP strategist get away with trying to say that Clint made it okay to make fun of Obama. And Wolf basically went off (for Wolf anyway) about the disrespect of POTUS.
BTW, the GOP hacks said that Clint Eastwood did have a speech, but he basically through it out.
Say what? Wolfie the lapdog actually barked at a GOPster?
What is this world coming to? Is a mass epidemic of sanity breaking out in the media?
No janicket.
He’s just doing his job as part of the fix.
Bet on it.
AG
That is soooooooo lame. Wolf Blitzer is a pimple.
THAT’S his response to Eastwood’s speech? “You can’t disrespect the President!”
Of all the things one could say about that performance, that’s what he comes up with?
Booman or some other FP-er
You’ve got to post the tweet by the Obama campaign with the pic attached
“This sit already taken”
The picture is classic!
Have I mentioned that I love the Obama campaign staff’s quickness
Nice!
Clint was Clint, as far as that goes. There were a few points he made which might be considered relevant. But still, there was just too much rambling for this thing to make any sense. On the whole, I thought it was pretty much a dud.
Clint Eastwood reminded the GOP that there were conservatives in Hollywood (how quickly they forget the Gipper). He said that Guantanamo should be closed (then slamming the idea of using the US legal system to do it). He said that we should get out of Afghanistan today (and slammed the idea of a scheduled withdrawal). He lied about the number of people who are unemployed. And he got the good Christian white GOP audience to say “Go f*ck yourself” in their brains while they were laughing. The audience took it as a red meat attack on Obama. And he got them to say the punchline for the Romney/Ryan team, “Make my day!”
Outside of the party platform, what we saw in the convention was three solid days of trash talking. It’s a sport. It’s a team. The policy is in the secret platform–just ignore it until the GOP claims it for a mandate after the election.
So now the faithful go out and spin the convention as this great success in responding to Obama’s policies.
(And if my racist conservative friends say “long-legged mack daddy” one more time, I might find my way to Atlanta and give a certain black minister the what-for. There’s a preacher who needs to be roundly and soundly churched.)
WTF was that?
It’s so funny seeing people who love Clint Eastwood. Because you can bet that they are the ones who thought it was no big deal.
But let me tell you my FB timeline was not as forgiving as Eastwood fans seemed willing to be.
First of all, Clint Eastwood said “WE OWN THIS COUNTRY”, my reaction and the reaction of my FB timeline was Who da F is “we”? But hey no big deal.
Oh and who can’t laugh at a “go f* yourself” joke. love or hate ’em, if Dems had did the empty chair thing to Bush, we would all be embarassed as the RNC an Romney should be. Oh and who can’t laugh at a “go f* yourself” joke.
It was embarassing and I know, I know, it’s just an office, but it was damn disrespectful to boot.
But hey Clint’s 82, he’s an icon, let’s give ’em a break. Betty White is what, 92 year old, and I sure as heck bet shw wouldn’t give a peformance like that, so Clint ain’t got no excuse.
Heck like I said upthread, even Wolf “F’n” Blitzer was appalled and actually pushed back at Ari Fleisher and Alex Constellanos when they tried to push that “way hey it wasn’t that bad”, it was a “joke” and the usual Romney line “hey the crowd loved it”.
I saw this live, the stunned reactions of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams and Andrea Mitchell after Clint Eastwood all but told President Obama to go ** himself while interviewing an empty chair
http://youtu.be/kKf0ak5hWSQ
Why “stunned?” Is this not precisely what the Rats want the American public to say to Obama? It was good political tactics, that’s all.
Cleverly written, cleverly acted and…most importantly…cleverly aimed.
AG
A diary up on Daily Kos right now makes the point that Eastwood and his audience projected all their imagined and loathsome opinions of Obama onto the person supposedly sitting in the chair. It was not the real Obama, but their delusion version of Obama that was on stage. I agree. As I said above, people who think it’s funny to imply the President uses such language are on the wrong side of this one.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/31/1126495/-James-Lipton-The-words-were-vulgar-and-worse-they-
were-disrespectful-Eastwood-at-RNC
“….imply the President uses such language?”
What?
You think that he doesn’t? I mean…could be, but that would put him in the vast minority of American political leaders who do not “use such language.”
It’s American English, Heart. On the street…where Obama spent a good deal of his time as student and later as a community organizer…what do you think he heard as language? Shakespeare? Please.
Politics is a high-level street fight. If Obama doesn’t “use such language,” maybe he oughta start. Maybe he simply doesn’t let himself get mad enough, and that’s why he has been so ineffectual in the mosh pits of DC politics. A couple of good, old-fashioned “Go fuck yourselves” coupled with a threat to back it up with the full power of the Federal government might throw a fright into some of the hustlers who have been blocking him for four years.
That’s my take on it, anyway.
AG
I’m hoping for Gallagher at the 2016 RNC.
Yes, I’m sure they’ll be even more desperate in 2016 to gain minority voters, and even more defensive about their horrible, horrible policies. So, it’ll be “amusing” to see the prominently placed delegations from Puerto Rico and other minority territories sprayed by Gallagher’s Veg-a-Matic.