Clint Eastwood was his usual candid self when speaking with Extra TV about hisnow-infamous "empty chair" speech at the Republican National Convention."If somebody's dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they're gonna have to take what they get," the veteran actor told an Extra correspondent during a one-on-one interview about his upcoming film Trouble with the Curve (skip to 2:15 in the video below).
Asked if Mitt Romney was that "somebody," Eastwood initially said "yeah," before adding, "actually, he had some of his people ask." In another interview on today's episode of Ellen, Eastwood poked some more fun at his rambling diatribe, saying "the Democrats who were watching thought I was going senile, and the Republicans knew I was."
Snap! Don't mess with Clint.
Even Peggy Noonan is going apeshit over conservative ineptitude.
The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.
My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.
This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.
We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.
You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.
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You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.
They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.
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It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”
