What Eastwood's Chair Really Said

Via: Francesco Francavilla

LOL!

The Chair Responds to Eastwood:

Chair: What did people say when you said you were going to talk to an empty chair?
Eastwood: You're absolutely crazy.


Colbert Interviews Eastwood's Chair:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Mitt has Forrest Gump Moments in Louisiana Flood

source: facebook

Just when you think Mitt Romney couldn't possibly sound more clueless than he has in the past, he surprises us with new depths of confusion. He left the Republican Convention and went straight to Louisiana to see the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac. He could offer no help to the victims since right now he holds no office, but he probably thought it would be a good photo-op for himself and Governor Bobby Jindal.

Well, the pictures are pretty good, but Mitt's responses - not so much.

Washington Post

“We really appreciate you coming here,” Jindal said.

“I appreciate the chance to be here,” Romney replied. “I have a lot of questions for you.” The two discussed evacuation procedures and the contributions of the Red Cross, Salvation Army and other organizations.

“Did the water come from the sky, or the rivers, or the ocean?” Romney asked. Jindal’s response was not audible to reporters.

Well, that quote is worthy of Forrest Gump right there. I would love to know Jindal's response, LOL.

We've been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stinging rain...and big old fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night.
~ Forrest Gump


I think this is another example of surrogate fail, since one of his advisers could have shown him a map or explained the difference between rain and storm surge. Maybe a Google Earth Map of Lake Ponchatrain. And that big river over thar? That be the Old Man, I mean, the Mississippi. You can imagine him saying "Oh, it's so big! Are you sure that's is a river? In Michigan rivers are the right size."

*sigh*

And unfortunately Mitt had some mind-numbingly bad advice for victims:

From AFP

There, with the world's media looking on, he met 22-year-old mother-of-two Ashley Vegas, whose home was destroyed by a 12-foot (four-meter) wall of water, and whose bare feet contrasted oddly with Romney's suede loafers.

His advice for the suddenly homeless family? Seek a bailout from the US federal government's disaster agency FEMA by calling its 211 emergency hotline.

Vegas was thankful for the lifeline, open to many in Louisiana since Romney's opponent President Barack Obama declared a federal emergency there earlier this week, freeing up government rescue funds for beleaguered communities.

"I think he's a very good man," Vegas volunteered. "He's here to help everybody and do what he can."

Yeah, call FEMA - if they haven't been defunded by the Republicans led by Paul Ryan. LOL. (sorry, that's not really too funny) But notice that Obama was the one who freed up the funding for Louisiana at the request of Bobby Jindal, which is ironic in itself, since Jindal's tendency has been to turn down "hand-outs" from the Federal Government.

Romney gave his bad advice to more than one person:

Mediaite quoting AP

When faced with one of the victims of the flood, however, Romney came up well short in the empathy department. From The Associated Press:

Romney and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) spent close to an hour meeting with first responders and local officials. Romney shook hands with National Guardsmen outside the U.S. Post Office and talked with a local resident, Jodie Chiarello, 42, who lost her home in Isaac’s flooding.

“He just told me to, um, there’s assistance out there,” Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. “He said, go home and call 211.” That’s a public service number offered in many states.

Chiarello said she will likely seek some other shelter because her home was submerged in the flooding.

In Romney’s defense, at least he didn’t offer her a quarter for the payphone.
For a candidate whom voters already don’t think understands their struggles, who is on an already cynical-looking tour of a disaster area, and whose party has a famously bad record of helping people during natural disasters, this is not a great headline. You could say, in fairness to Romney, that at least he was trying to help, but when someone tells you their house just got submerged in a flood, telling them to go home isn’t actually all that helpful.

source: Reuters

Obama Jokes About Republican Convention

This is just hilarious! Obama pokes the Republican Convention with some delicious snark. I'm sure we'll hear more of this next week at the Dem Convention in Charlotte ~ I can't wait!

Last week the other party gave you their pitch at the convention down in Florida.

(crowd boos)

Don't boo ~ vote!

(crowd cheers)

It was something to behold. Despite all the challenges that we face in this new century what they offered over those three days was, more often than not, an agenda that was better suited for the last century. It was a re-run. We'd seen it before.

You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV.

If you didn't DVR it, let me recap it for you: Everything's bad, it's Obama's fault, and Governor Romney is the only one who knows the secret to creating jobs and growing the economy. That was the pitch.

There was a lot of talk about hard truths and bold choices, (laughs) but no one ever bothered to tell you what they were.

And when Governor Romney had his chance to let you in on his secret, he did not offer a single new idea. Just retreads of the same old policies that have been sticking it to the middle class for years. They talked a lot about me. They talked a lot about him. But they didn't say much about you.

President Obama as Clint Eastwood's Invisible Straw Man

As an English major and bookish person, it's fascinating to me that iconic books are beginning to define the candidates.

For the Republicans it's clearly anything written by Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged to The Fountainhead.  John Galt represents the selfish "every person for themselves" attitude that causes the Republican Congress to block or stonewall every social program that might help anyone, and their vision of society is of one divided between successful wealthy people and the slacker rabble who are beneath them.

My posts about the Republicans and Ayn Rand's books:
Ayn Rand and the Politics of Egomania
More on the Ryan and Ayn Connection

For the Democrats, the new book reference, thanks to Clint Eastwood, is Ralph Ellison's amazing book, Invisible Man.

Thursday night at the Republican Convention, Clint Eastwood played out a bizarre ad lib between himself as a typical Republican and an empty chair representing President Obama. While it's easy to laugh and blame the whole thing on the senility of an aging actor past his prime, what he did was quite symbolic.

Obviously the Republicans want Obama's chair to be "empty" - they want him gone from the White House.  Back in April,  the Romneys were asked in an interview what they would like to say to President Obama, they said Obama should just get out of the White House. Get out of the Oval Office - here we come!

Source: The Hill

"Well, start packing. That's what I'd like to say. Obviously we have a very different view. The president, I'm sure wants another four years, but the first few didn't go so well," Romney said.
"His policies have not helped the American people. They have not helped get jobs, they have not helped raise incomes and they’ve added trillions of dollars of debt,” Romney added.
The sentiment was echoed by Romney's wife, Ann, who has played an increasingly prominent role in the campaign in recent weeks.
"I believe it's Mitt's time. I believe the country needs the kind of leadership he's going to offer… So I think it's our turn now," Ann Romney said.

Notice what he also does in that quote - Mitt blabs a bunch of other things about Obama implying he hasn't done any good for the country and has created all the national debt by himself, which is a lie. In fact, Romney lies nearly continuously in his speeches about what Obama has or hasn't done, and other Republicans are worse. John Sununu and Donald Trump call him "foreign," and the birthers cheer. Sarah Palin says he wants to kill Grandma with a death panel, and everyone waves a flag. It's just rank propoganda and vicious rhetoric that bears no likeness to the truth.

In debate, that is known as creating a "straw man."
From "Fallacy Files":

Etymology:
"Straw man" is one of the best-named fallacies, because it is memorable and vividly illustrates the nature of the fallacy. Imagine a fight in which one of the combatants sets up a man of straw, attacks it, then proclaims victory. All the while, the real opponent stands by untouched.

So we have real Obama, who was born in the United States and has been a really good President for four years, then we have this demon straw man who is just a diabolical fiend, conspiring with his own parents before he was born to become President and drive Tea Party members insane 50 years later.

What Clint Eastwood did with his comedy sketch was to imagine Obama sitting in that chair on stage, in effect creating an "imaginary straw man." How do we know that his vision of Obama was not the real thing? Well, he put words into Obama's mouth that he wouldn't say - our President just isn't going to tell Mitt or anyone else to "F*** himself," which is what Clint implied as a joke. It was just unfunny.

Eric Stetson wrote in an essay called "Attacking an Imaginary Obama"

It is not insignificant that Clint Eastwood pretended that the imaginary Barack Obama he was talking to responded to him with vulgarity. On multiple occasions, he pretended that Obama cursed him with the f-word as a response to his political criticisms. The real President Obama would not do this, of course, because he is a gentleman who speaks in a dignified manner. Republicans like Clint Eastwood cannot stand that. The Obama of their imagination is ghetto trash, the kind of person who would cuss and make his points using vulgarity rather than well-reasoned arguments. They literally imagine him as their image of the stereotypical young urban thug, because the reality of a young black liberal gentleman is too difficult for them to comprehend or accept.

Exactly. The invisible straw man in that chair is not the real Obama.

Hungry Coyote on Daily Kos has a great diary about the disrespect shown to Obama by Eastwood, and I won't try to repeat all of it because I want to actually discuss the literature involved with some quotes from Ellison.

But first let's just look at a quote from MSNBC transcript she has kindly provided, a snippet of discussion between James Lipton of the Actor's Studio and Chris Hayes.

Chris Hayes: . . . he was sitting in a chair. So he was being literally talked; literally, physically talked down to.

James Liption: Down to.

Chris Hayes: Down to, and like a school boy; like an errant school boy, and my executive producer made this point about you know, Clint Eastwood and the RNC should go back and read The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison because actually, there's a whole masterpiece of American literature ... around the experience of invisibility in front of the white power structure for a black man in America. And obviously that was; I don't want to say like that that was obviously the intentional subtext. I think it was not thought out. I just think it was they wanted to have a gag. But the way it reads was deeply, deeply profoundly, profoundly disrespectful in a way that really, I found kind of upsetting.

James Liption: One of the things about this campaign that has fascinated me is the number of jokes that have gone over like lead balloons.

Alex Wagner: yes.

James Liption: I've never heard quite so many jokes that weren't really funny. They're structured like a joke, sounds like a joke; you think you're listening to a joke, except it's not funny.

I think Ralph Ellison would concur - it's unfunny to imagine a black man as errant schoolboy - or "boy" of any kind, especially in the 21st century. The trouble is, the Republicans seem to long for the plantation past with their talk of secession as the answer to all problems, and their denial about America becoming more brown and less white all the time. I think that's why they are desperate enough to let their racism show.

Every time we hear a string of dog whistles in a speech, what the speaker is really just showing you his ideal straw man - a black person who never heard of civil rights, who never went to college, who never wrote a book or owned a house or entered the middle class. In his convention acceptance speech Mitt Romney, like Santorum before him, mocked Obama for being a lawyer, when all three of them went to the same exact Law School at Harvard. That is like making yourself into a straw man, then attacking yourself with just as much ferocity lest someone mistake you for your enemy. It must be painful to go on stabbing yourself that way, but Mitt, Ryan and the others want to highlight differences, not similarities.

African Americans back in the day endured a type of apartheid, restricted to certain neighborhoods, certain jobs, certain schools, certain expectations. Ellison was a man of that time, and as in Kathryn Stockett's recent novel The Help set in Mississippi during the sixties civil rights movement, people were expected to "know their place," to sit in the corner, to look down, and to never speak up. Ironically, that learned behavior of obsequiousness certainly helped the struggle as they followed Gandhi's rules of non-violence and Thoreau's idea of civil disobedience. Brave people were willing to endure anything to change the system, from the indignity of mustard poured over their heads at a lunch counter or being chased by police dogs on a public street or thrown in jail.

And Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel was just one of a number of great American books that influenced social change in the 60s, but given that the Republicans don't see President Obama clearly and Eastwood literally made him the "Invisible Man" on stage in Tampa, here are some quotes from the book that can remind us of the plight of President Obama. No matter what he does, 30% of American won't accept him as a "real American," and many of them will never admit they were wrong. But they are the ones who can't see themselves clearly.

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie extoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

“I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”

“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied”

"America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many -- This in not prophecy, but description."