Legendary actor Clint Eastwood put on a skit tonight that’s destined to be oft-referenced in political convention lore.
“I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, what’s a movie tradesman doing out here? You know, they are all left-wingers out there, left of Lenin. At least that is what people think,” he said at the Republican National Convention. “That is not really the case. There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot-dogging it.”
The 82-year-old Eastwood, opening for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, used a prop of an empty chair and teleprompter to ask an invisible President Obama “a couple of questions.”
He reflected on election night four years years ago. “I just thought, this was great. Everybody is crying, Oprah was crying,” Eastwood said. “I was even crying. And then finally — and I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there’s 23 million unemployed people in this country.”
“So, Mr. President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them?” he asked the chair. “…And I thought, well closing Gitmo — why close that, we spent so much money on it. But, I thought maybe as an excuse — what do you mean shut up? OK, I thought maybe it was just because somebody had the stupid idea of trying terrorists in downtown New York City.”
He then referenced the war in Afghanistan. “We didn’t check with the Russians to see how they did it — they did there for 10 years.”
“I wondered about when the — what do you want me to tell Romney? I can’t tell him to do that. I can’t tell him to do that to himself,” Eastwood quipped. “You’re crazy, you’re absolutely crazy. You’re getting as bad as Biden. Of course we all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic party. Kind of a grin with a body behind it.”
The actor said he was glad that Romney and Paul Ryan came along as he “never thought it was a good idea for attorneys to the president, anyway.”
“I would just like to say something, ladies and gentlemen. Something that I think is very important. It is that, you, we — we own this country,” Eastwood said. “And — so — they are just going to come around and beg for votes every few years. It is the same old deal. But I just think it is important that you realize , that you’re the best in the world. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you’re libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.”
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