Demoralized as Hell: Clint Eastwood Edition

When I saw the new Three Stooges Movie my first reac­tion was meh!

It was OK but wasn’t all that spe­cial. When peo­ple asked me about the movie how­ever I found my self talk­ing about funny scenes (Do-​nut Remover) and laugh­ing. When I went back with my other son I found myself laugh­ing and that’s when it hit me. When I went the first time I was think­ing Moe, Larry & Curly from the 30’s & 40’s. the orig­i­nal Stooges. When I saw it with­out the expec­ta­tions of the past I was able to enjoy the movie for what it was. (Still didn’t like the baby duel scene).

That brings us to Clint East­wood at the RNC.

When I watched East­wood on the stage I thought it was one of the weird­est things I had seen. While he made some great points he looked his age, and while the chair busi­ness was some­thing right out of the six­ties, Morey Ams­ter­dam and Bob Newhart.

As Time magazine’s Mark Halperin explained on MSNBC’s “Morn­ing Joe” on Fri­day, “I think every­one has missed that Eastwood’s per­for­mance is very closely based on a Morey Ams­ter­dam per­for­mance from din­ner the­ater in Bay­onne. Kind of night at the improv.”

Ams­ter­dam was a stand-​up comic who had his own sit­com on TV from 1948 to 1950 and also appeared on “The Dick Van Dyke Show “as Buddy Sorrell.

But the argu­ment could be made that East­wood was also evok­ing a lit­tle Bob Newhart, whose clas­sic “Dri­ving Instruc­tor” rou­tine first appeared on his “The Button-​Down Mind of Bob Newhart” album in 1960.

This actu­ally makes sense peo­ple tend to remem­ber the com­edy of their youth (you see a lot of Python here) but the real ques­tion is: Did it work?

I noted at the time East­wood man­aged to accom­plish sev­eral things, hold­ing the audi­ence & absorb­ing the hits from the left, but my thought is that he basi­cally won a news cycle and that’s it.

Not Any­more.

Appar­ently Clint East­wood struck a never fever nation­ally and the White House and the left is wor­ried, VERY Worried.

The left has been hit­ting East­wood non-​stop for 5 days, b-​f list celebs con­tinue to pound on twit­ter.

It’s been 5 days, the media is STILL hit­ting Eastwood

With apolo­gies to Bob Newhart the empty chair rou­tine has now been dubed “Eastwooding”.

And lets look at the top of Meme­o­ran­dum this Tuesday

Politico: Right ral­lies for Empty Chair Day .

The right ral­lied on Labor Day to cel­e­brate “National Empty Chair Day,” a show of sol­i­dar­ity with Clint East­wood after his ram­bling address to an invis­i­ble Pres­i­dent Barack Obama at the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion last week.

The action picked up steam on Twit­ter, where the hash­tag #emp­ty­chair­day began trend­ing on Mon­day morn­ing as users tweeted pic­tures of empty chairs in var­i­ous poses.

Cleve­land Plain Dealer: AFSCME Pres­i­dent (and Cleve­land native) Lee Saun­ders goes East­wood­ing with Ohio Democrats

“So Dirty Harry, make my day,” Saun­ders con­tin­ued, quot­ing the East­wood char­ac­ter. “We’re gonna kick some ass in November.”

Then he kicked the chair. Loudly.

And now we have the left try­ing to get Betty White to counter East­wood at the DNC: ABC News:

They’ve taken on big banks and work­ers’ rights abuses, now the pro­gres­sive activists at Change​.org have their sights set on bring­ing come­di­enne Betty White, 90, to the Demo­c­ra­tic National Convention.

“Clint East­wood, the Republican’s ‘mys­tery guest’ at the RNC, gave a bad name to older Amer­i­cans every­where with his absurd and awkward-​to-​watch intro­duc­tion of Gov­er­nor Rom­ney,” Peter Slut­sky wrote in his peti­tion to draft White. “Gov­er­nor Rom­ney can have Clint East­wood and his impro­vi­sa­tional skills because Pres­i­dent Obama has the one and only Betty White!”

Remem­ber this is Meme­o­ran­dum TODAY 5 days later and this is still on top.

I thought the East­wood thing was a one day blip, but I was wrong, this has turned out to be dev­as­tat­ing to the left.

One day Sto­ries don’t gen­er­ate events that gen­er­ate Politico coverage.

Inef­fec­tive speeches don’t cause Union pres­i­dents to phys­i­cally beat up chairs dur­ing speeches

And if the East­wood thing was so bad, you don’t have peo­ple scram­bling to find an even older actress to take the stage to counter.

This speech:

Has gen­er­ated over 300,000 views on Youtube (303,883), it has gen­er­ated 2,348 likes, 1,926 dis­likes almost 4500 votes it is still pro­duc­ing reac­tion 5 days later.

This has absolutely ter­ri­fied the left, a left already scared to death and you know what that means…

“Ride right through them, they’re demor­al­ized as hell”!

These punks don’t feel lucky.

Update: Karl put it well

After all, who is Clint East­wood? He is one of the top actors, direc­tors and pro­duc­ers of motion pic­tures in the world. Most of the world — and almost cer­tainly every­one tun­ing in to the RNC Thurs­day night — knows this. Yet most of the analy­ses of his RNC appear­ance are based on the notion that we were not wit­ness­ing act­ing. That mass sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief may be the high­est trib­ute East­wood will ever be paid as an actor. If you think the East­wood on stage was the only East­wood there is, watch him pro­mot­ing J. Edgar on The Daily Show last Novem­ber. I have lit­tle doubt he will be equally sharp pro­mot­ing Trou­ble With the Curve in the next few weeks.

Update 2: Insta­lanche, Thanks Glenn, per­haps the left is busy on East­wood because they’d rather not cover the Mass. Dem Chair­man say­ing Scott Brown is try­ing to be an “hon­orary girl” by fold­ing clothes, How Intrade can be moved for the price on a car­rot on a plate, the inter­est­ing split in the Athe­ist com­mu­nity (non pro­gres­sives need not apply) or how Demo­c­rat pols are doing their best imper­son­ation of char­ac­ters from Doc­tor Who.