August 31, 2012 | 5:20 PM | By

Best Tweets About Clint Eastwood’s Strange RNC Speech

FILED UNDER: Reforming Government, Clint Eastwood, Republican National Convention

Click on photo for best tweets about Eastwood speech (Photo gdcgraphics/Flickr)

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Last night at the Republican National Convention, movie star, director and cultural icon Clint Eastwood gave an address that might politely be called awkward. Eastwood started out fine, attempting to debunk the notion that all of Hollywood is liberal. “There’s a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people — Republicans, Democrats — in Hollywood. It’s just that conservative people, by the nature of the word itself, play it a little more close to the vest and they don’t go around hotdoggin’ it.”

It’s at that juncture that the 82-year-old Eastwood seemed to belie that very point by engaging in a flamboyant performance piece that might put some Democrats in mind of a first-year acting exercise, others of a breakthrough Gestalt therapy session, and to the truly uncharitable a temporary psychotic break. What Eastwood did was put an imaginary Barack Obama in a real chair he had toted on stage, then engage the president in a rather one-sided conversation.

Even — or especially — the Romney camp was not digging the act. From the New York Times today:

Clint Eastwood’s rambling and off-color endorsement of Mitt Romney on Thursday seemed to startle and unsettle even the candidate’s own top aides, several of whom made a point of distancing themselves from the decision to put him onstage without a polished script.

“Not me,” said an exasperated-looking senior adviser, when asked who was responsible for Mr. Eastwood’s speech. In late-night interviews, aides variously called the speech “strange” and “weird.” One described it as “theater of the absurd.”

Finger-pointing quickly ensued, suggesting real displeasure and even confusion over the handling of Mr. Eastwood’s performance, which was kept secret until the last minute. Full article

And Wisconsin governor and GOP star Scott Walker said  he “cringed” at Eastwood’s performance.

To be fair, Eastwood made the day of most of the partisan crowd, who ate this schtick up. And Reason.com is giving Eastwood a big thumbs-up in an article called “Dotty Old Clint Eastwood Gave the Best Speech of the Week.”

But the off-color appearance will probably do nothing to mend fences between Eastwood and the GOP establishment/pundit class, some of whom last year went into high-dudgeon mode after the iconic tough guy cut a Super Bowl ad for Chrysler that was interpreted as a stealth Obama campaign commercial in praise of the auto industry bailout. To which Eastwood said on Bill O’Reilly’s show: “I just want to say that the spin stops with you guys, and there is no spin in that ad…I am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama. It was meant to be a message just about job growth and the spirit of America.”

Eastwood, by the way, was born in San Francisco, moved to Piedmont, and went to Oakland Technical High School. Proving that not everyone from the Bay Area winds up a Democrat, but not proving that everyone from the area doesn’t wind up a little strange.

Here’s the video of Clint’s speech…


And now…Twitter, do your stuff…

Twitter / Account Suspended

 

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/joeschmitt/status/241531217047085056

 

https://twitter.com/BorowitzReport/status/241547739396177920

 

 

https://twitter.com/DCdebbie/status/241387709774569472

 

https://twitter.com/BorowitzReport/status/241572427040186368

 

https://twitter.com/BorowitzReport/status/241649027865780226

 

Update: The Clint meme is preoccupying the entire Internet today. Take a look at these photos…

  • Dario

    Democrats are running scared, even from an empty chair!