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Politicos and policy wonks have been parsing every major speech offered at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, each with his or her own lens. (The exception is MSNBC, which apparently declined to parse several speeches by ethnic minorities.) Some have commented on the gender-war content of Ann Romney’s statements; some have focused on the deep policy weeds of Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan. But the most transformative moment — in its way, the most redolent of the Tea Party revolution — was Clint Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair in which President Obama was not sitting. One of the...

RUSH: Now, I don’t know about you. I love words. Words mean things. Even words that sound like throwaway words. When Eastwood said, “I was watching that night when he was having that thing,” people said, “He’s senile! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He couldn’t even remember what that was.” No, no, no! “Having that thing” is perfect. Yeah, “they were having that thing.” This is the perfect way to diminish it. He was talking about Obama and Grant Park after the election. All these people, the zombies, are lighting candles. They don’t even know why they’re there....

President Obama’s spokesman derided Clint Eastwood for his remarks at the Republican National Convention, in which Eastwood made a series of jokes at the president’s expense by pretending to conduct an interview with Obama while only talking to an empty chair. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was watching,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday of Eastwood’s performance. He prefaced that dismissal by saying, “I’m a huge fan and admirer of Clint Eastwood’s work, both as a director and an actor.” Eastwood made several jokes at Obama’s expense and that of Vice President Joe Biden (whom he called...

Rachel Maddow arguably had the most stunned reaction of anyone in cable news last night to Clint Eastwood‘s speech at the Republican National Convention last night. She followed up on her show tonight, putting particular emphasis on the RNC’s bizarre decision to not air the Mitt Romney biographical video in the primetime slot in favor of Eastwood spending over ten minutes scolding an empty chair. Maddow said that the timing of Eastwood’s speech was not good for the GOP, because they needed the “maximum political impact” from Romney’s speech last night, and it was completely eclipsed by Eastwood’s confusing rambling....

TAMPA, Fla. -- Clint Eastwood put on an odd skit Thursday night at the Republican National Convention. It was awkward to watch and hard to hear, but I have to hand it to Eastwood. He achieved the impossible; he made the gaffe-prone Mitt Romney come across as supremely tactful. Four years ago, when Barack Obama was elected president, Eastwood told the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, Eastwood thought: "This is great. Everybody was crying. Oprah was crying. I was even crying." But with 23 million Americans unemployed and the Obama White House not sufficiently interested in solving the nation's...

When "Dirty Harry" interviewed "Invisible Obama" at the Republican convention Thursday night, Clint Eastwood gained a new kind of fame, as the butt of jokes all over the Twitter-verse. "Idea for a cable drama: Clint Eastwood is a hard-boiled cop that sees his dead partner in every empty chair. It's called 'La-Z Boys in Blue,'"read one tweet. "Give Clint Eastwood a break. ...The RNC asked him to speak about ObamaCare and he thought they said ObamaChair," read another. The actor's mock interview of an empty chair purportedly representing President Obama turned into one of the most-talked-about events of the entire...

Vogue’s editor-at-large apparently didn’t take too kindly to Clint Eastwood’s @InvisibleObama routine last night. As a result, he’s urging others to keep away from Eastwood’s upcoming film, “Trouble with the Curve,” which, as it happens, is not about women in baseball.

Tampa 2012: In remarks to a chair as vacant as the one in the Oval Office, a Hollywood icon reminds us that the president is a failed employee of the people and it's time to let him go. As performance shtick, it may not have come off perfectly. But judging from the reaction from those "left of Lenin," as 82-year-old Hollywood legend described it during a sort of surprise appearance at the Republican National Convention Thursday, it skewered our absentee president perfectly. "Clint, my hero, is coming across as sad and pathetic," tweeted "left of Lenin" film critic Roger Ebert...

Follow up to this post... 

August 31, 2012 Clint Eastwood puts liberals in full panic mode Derek Hunter Liberals wanted nothing more than to see a divided Republican Party this week, sputtering out of Tampa and limping across the country. They didn’t get that.   What they got was a party united behind their nominee and in purpose.   This unity has caused even more panic than normal.   While waiting to interview former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, I listened to a reporter from CBS ask him three questions in a row about how he’s out of the mainstream of the party because of...

The claims of Mitt Romney being unapproachable, stiff, doesn't care about people, a murderer, a job-snatcher, ridiculous. As hubby says, "if you have an emotional connection to Barack Obama, something's wrong with you," or as Clint Eastwood said while he was winding-up to the "Eastwooding" of Obama: "it's just that the conservative people, by the nature of the word itself, play it a little close to the vest...they don't go around hotdogging it.... (no Greek Temple, no smoke, no memories of Indonesia). I love his son saying "we felt like we were the most important thing in our Dad's life,"...

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Save a little for Mitt. 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. 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. So...

...Clint is a brilliant actor, and a superb director of other actors (and I don’t just mean a quarter-century ago: in the last five years, he’s made eight films). He’s also, as Mr Gavin observed, a terrific jazz improvisor at the piano – and, in film and music documentaries, an extremely articulate interviewee. So I wouldn’t assume that the general tenor of his performance wasn’t exactly as he intended. The hair was a clue: no Hollywood icon goes out on stage like that unless he means to. John Hayward writes: >>>The intended recipient was not Mitt Romney, the convention delegates,...

We know how Obama responded to Clint Eastwood's RNC performance, here's the response to the response 

Hollywood may be bashing Clint Eastwood's performance at the GOP convention, but Rush Limbaugh said Friday the reason is that he touched a nerve with leftist celebrities — and with the president himself. Pointing to the photo the Obama camp tweeted after midnight showing the back of the president's head above the office chair in the Oval Office, Mr. Limbaugh said that proves the White House was worried. And he wondered whether it was Mr. Obama himself. "It must have gotten to him because he tweeted at 12:30," Mr. Limbaugh said Friday on his radio program.

Apparently there are videos being posted on the Web of people scolding an empty chair.

The reviews continue to pour in on Clint Eastwood’s appearance at the Republican National convention Thursday night, and "mixed" might be a charitable way to put it. One prominent Republican, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, said that he "cringed" at the performance. An unattributed release from the Romney campaign defended Eastwood, according to The Wall Street Journal: "Judging an American icon like Clint Eastwood through a typical political lens doesn’t work. His ad-libbing was a break from all the political speeches, and the crowd enjoyed it,” the statement read.

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Watching Clint Eastwood's speech (albeit a little late) and oh my god. Who gave the neighborhood grandpa with dementia a microphone? — Hannah Greenberg (@hannahgre) August 31, 2012 When 82-year-old veteran actor/producer Clint Eastwood announced his endorsement of Mitt Romney earlier this month, tolerant liberals could think of only one good reason a Hollywood legend would choose a Republican over Planet Healer and Tinseltown money-grubber Barack Obama: Dementia. The disrespectful armchair geriatricians are back. After his memorable, crotchety, completely ad-libbed convention speech tonight, senior citizen-bashers took to Twitter to deride Eastwood’s state of mind: I didn't expect the RNC to...