Missed Clint Eastwood's Republican National Convention speech where he spoke to an empty chair representing Pres. Obama. People ridiculed it but as blogger Lambert Strether notes, Eastwood mentioned two topics that won't otherwise be raised by either Republicans or Democrats (boldface mine, footnotes omitted):
[STRETHER} So, leaving the famous chair aside — and though it’s not a bad riff, it’s a riff that only the Ron Paul types Romney purged from the party would be likely to run with — what are some of the things Eastwood actually says? Here’s one of the many interesting questions Eastwood raises:
[EASTWOOD:] So, Mr. President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them? I mean, what do you say to people? … I know even people in your own party were very disappointed when you didn’t close Gitmo …
[STRETHER] Somehow, I doubt we’re going to hear Gitmo mentioned in Charlotte, or by Romney, for that matter, showing again, if it needs to be shown, how close Obama and Romney really are. Apparently, only an “old mumbly guy … hearing voices in his head,” as Lord Kos gracefully puts it, would be so gauche as to raise such a topic. (Of course, when our guy does whatever, name it, it’s OK, so everything’s jake!) Here’s more from Eastwood:
[EASTWOOD:] [Y]ou thought the war in Afghanistan was OK. You know, I mean — you thought that was something worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to see how did it — they did there for 10 years. But we did it, and it is something to be thought about, and I think that, when we get to maybe — I think you’ve mentioned something about having a target date for bringing everybody home. You gave that target date, and I think Mr. Romney asked the only sensible question, you know, he says, “Why are you giving the date out now? Why don’t you just bring them home tomorrow morning?”
[STRETHER] Not scripted, ad libbed, ums and ahs, yadda yadda yadda, and so what? Once again, it takes a loveable old coot like Eastwood — which is how this flap would be playing if Eastwood had given the same speech at the DNCon to an empty chair named Romney — to raise a question that neither candidate and neither legacy party will raise. I mean, if we won Iraq, where was the victory parade? And if there’s a reason to stay in Afghanistan, what is it? Afghanistan, graveyard of empires, and that. Bottom line for me is that both legacy parties now hate the guy, although for different reasons, which to me implies he’s worth taking seriously.