new hair

So, Clint Eastwood showed up at the RNC. Woo Hoo. Eastwood is one of my favorite actors and directors. I saw the re-runs of Rawhide. I have seen Dirty Harry, Every Which Way But Loose, Sudden Impact, Unforgiven, In the Line of Fire and Gran Torino… to name a few. I dialed up C-Span to look at Clint Eastwood.

Make my day, punk – What the hell is that? He opens with the statement that 23 million Americans are unemployed. This is a national disgrace, according to him, and he is right. It is a national disgrace that 23 million Americans were unemployed. Someone needs to take care that problem. But, wait. There aren’t 23 million Americans unemployed. This is easy. Any high school student can look this up on the internet. There are 12.8 million Americans who are unemployed. How do you screw that up? 12.8 isn’t close to 23. Now maybe, just maybe, he was talking about the total number of Americans who are underemployed and unemployed. That total is near 23 million. That number is a guess. We don’t measure underemployment. We guess at it.

Right turn Clyde – He then began rambling, starting in about Gitmo and how President Obama wanted to close Gitmo. Gitmo should have been closed, but its closure was blocked by Republicans. Eastwood acted for a second as if we hadn’t tried terrorists in New York. Like it was some new hair-brained idea. This was the high point of the speech. It was more rambling and downhill from there.

“We own this country” was probably his best line, but it was followed by more rambling.

Look, I still will watch Clint Eastwood movies. His political ideas suck, but his movies don’t. At least most of them don’t (Space Cowboys, Firefox, Any Which Way You Can – all duds). I hope he energized many at the RNC.