The Watering Hole: August 31 — Ummm, so this happened…

Posted on by

Awk-ward.

This cringe-worthy performance was an embarrassment at best, and appallingly pathetic at worst.  I have no idea what the Romney campaign was thinking when they allowed this to go over the prime time airwaves.  Wowzers.

This is our daily open thread — What do you think?

About these ads

130 thoughts on “The Watering Hole: August 31 — Ummm, so this happened…”

  2. Jamelle Bouie @jbouie

    This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.

  3. Christopher Orr @OrrChris

    Only possible Democratic response to Eastwood’s performance is to have William Shatner sing “Rocket Man” as their keynote. #RNC

  4. Chris Rock @chrisrockoz

    Clint Eastwood on the phone with Obama now: “It all went according to plan,sir.” #RNC #GOP2012

  6. Alex Pareene @pareene

    My god the arena is emptying out and it turns out this place has been full of literally thousands of Barack Obamas this entire time

    • He said that he would create 12 million jobs. And no, he didn’t say they would be American jobs.

      • That is the exact amount that is projected by CBO (?) right now. Of course he never says how.

  10. That was sad. Dirty Harry had nothing to say, and said it poorly in breaking voice to a nest of obvious and uninformed idiots.

    The speech did highlight the entire convention’s essence, though; ’twas a giant pile of nothing at all, an attempt to do a Nuremberg without an Albert Speer, with idiots only.

    Amurka. What a wonnerful country: dead, but not quite forgotten. Yet.

    • Really. If they make that much of a mess out of a supposed to be planned event what would they do in the face of a disaster?

  11. John Fugelsang on Stephanie Miller:
    “This was for Mitt Romney who said let Detroit go bankrupt. So what you had there was Mr. Halftime in America endorsing Mr. Let’s Throw The Game.”

    • More Fugelsang:
      “A few minutes afterwards, Invisible Obama beat up Hologram Reagan.”

      • I saw a link on The Blaze that said they were going to have a hologram of Reagan but were afraid it would upstage Mitt.

  12. This week’s 2nd Amendment mass shooting comes to you this morning courtesy of the state of New Jersey.

  13. Thanks to everyone for watching the Ignorance on Parade reality show the last three days and keeping me up to date with the comments. I’d rather loose brain cells through booze and drugs then subject myself to witnessing the praising of propaganda.

  14. Clint Eastwood did accomplish one thing: he made John McCain seem like a spry youngster.

  16. I could only watch 3 minutes into it – when Dirty Harry criticized Obama on unemployment and saying we need someone to come in and solve the problem.

    Republicans blocked Obama’s solutions at every step, then blame him for not solving the problem. Their strategy from before Obama was inaugurated was to prevent him from succeeding, not because that was what was best for the country, but because that was the only way they could run against him.

    The second prong of their strategy is to disenfranchise their opponent. Again, not because it is best for America, but it is their route to power.

    If they succeed, armed revolution will be inevitable.

    • I hope they don’t succeed, because I really don’t want to have to take up arms against my own government. But if Republicans gain control, it will no longer be my government, so maybe that will make it easier for me.

  17. I couldn’t bring myself to watch much of the Big Brother Traveling Sanitation Show but from reading comments and news stories there seemed to be two basic themes. The first was talking about what a failure the President has been just as they said he would be 4 years ago. And the other was about how Willard and the Republicans are all really nice guys who should make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

    Lots of talk about the need to change things with no substance on what they would do to make those changes. Your basic shit souffle, all puff and fluff and waiting to fall.

  18. Hillary is not only avoiding the DNC next week but she seems to be going out of her way to avoid the festivities, as she is traveling this week and next to the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, Timor-Leste, Brunei, and Russia.

    • The State Dept is the most zealous to protect its apolitical status. I don’t recall Powell showing up in 2004 either.

  19. I feel bad for Clint Eastwood. I don’t think there’s any body of evidence that indicates he’s a bad person. He’s just lost enough brain function that he’s been convinced to pander to bad people. I think. It might have been a clever piece of performance art/sabotage but mostly I just think he’s lost his grip on reality much like anyone else who still calls themselves a Republican.

    • And Wolf Blitzer is on the list of targets? When they think Wolf Blitzer is a pinko …. well we’re not in Kansas anymore

    • That really is a fine collection of nutcase propagandists. It’s missing a few women, though, like Michelle and Dana. Oh, and whatshername, the scrawny blonde whose yeast infection reached her brain years ago.

    • Thathat link doesn’t show much other than a single sentence to me – where does the pipeline go? I can probably tell you who owns the line pretty quickly.

    • http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2012/08/23/edmonton-oily-water-leak.html

      Ok, I got it. This does not look like tar sands oil, but is to do with the regular oil reservoirs north and east of Calgary (Red Deer etc). This is a line to an injection well. This stuff is mostly water, some salts, some oil. This is a typical practice in a mature field – you need to inject water under pressure back into the ground to ‘drive’ oil from the edges of the oil reservoir towards production wells after the well’s production falls off. This stuff probably from underground to begin with – its on its way back. Having it piddle all over someone’s canola field isn’t fun – dude can probably still sell it, downgraded from food use probably. Company seems to be on top of it.

      • Thanks TtT. Just east of Red Deer which is halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. A long way from the tar sands. The injection process is called tertiray recovery and you’ve described it perfectly. They also use this process, along with directional drilling, to allow many wells to be drilled from one platform. This reduces the footprint on the ground and saves money by not having to drive and work at many locations.

        • I thought water flooding/gas injection was secondary and then injecting shit to make the oil flow, like hydrocarbons or steam, was tertiary?

          • I think tertiary and secondary recovery are very similar with the main difference being that tertiary is used to reduce viscosity using steam or, as you say, shit.

            In my mind, if you need only to stick a pipe in the ground, it’s primary. If you need a pump, it’s secondary. And if you have to pump anything down to get more our, it’s tertiary. That’s how my old boss characterized it.

            It seem, on further reading, that the spill in question may not be from any injection but just the ‘none oil’ products coming from a well. These by-products may be from an injection but the article doesn’t specify.

            On a side note, we used to have drinks with the president of Penn West in the 80′s. He was quite the drinker (And we weren’t *bullshit*)

            • Ah right on – primary = Spindletop, secondary = stick a lifting pump down the hole, tertiary = inject shit somewhere else to chase the black stuff to the extraction well. Understood.

              Those Red Deer fields are pretty old – is the petrochem works still on top of them?

  23. Its a good thing they got Clint to do this instead of da Donald. Saved them lots of embarrassment.

  24. Alex Pareene responds to the Romney’s line in the above video:

    “As we learned last week, Tampa is particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, because the sea levels are actively rising. But you know Obama didn’t make good on that promise so I guess maybe instead of mocking the concept of doing anything at all to halt or even slow the human activities leading to the sea level rise, Romney was just being realistic. It’s probably already too late, vote Romney and continue not thinking about how we’re all doomed.”

    And what’s with that maidenly held-tilt he does? It’s creepy and he needs to be reprogrammed.

    Daniel Larison critiques the needless Putin-bashing:

    “Calling out Putin by name in this speech may get him a few cheers from delegates and some glowing reviews from his stenographers in the media, but it will confirm Putin in his assumption that Americans aren’t to be trusted and should be viewed with suspicion. Romney has gone out of his way to make sure that relations with Russia will sour if he is elected, and I don’t think he or his advisers have thought through what that might mean for the U.S. The same goes for all of the other foreign policy positions the Romney campaign has taken so far.”

      • At times Romney had a smile that reminded me of a scene with Peter O’Toole in “My Favorite Year” where a former action/adventure film star of the 30′s & 40′s appears on live TV with a studio audience in the 50′s. After flying onto the set like a Musketeer he saves the star from harm from real criminals. The smiles O’Toole and Romney gave after their performances showed a self-satisfaction in absorbing the adulation being bestowed upon them. Both performers revealed their need to be loved.

  25. It could have been worse for Clint. He could have put Clyde, the orangutan, in that chair.

  26. One small point about Clint’s riff on Gitmo and the trial of terrorists. Why would Clint Eastwood of all people be so afraid of trying a mass-murdering Jihadist in New York City? Why would he be so terrified of incarcerating prisoners of war on American soil? Is he quaking in his cowboy boots because the evil terrorists might try to strike?

    The thing about modern Republican courage is that it is actually fear.

    • In fact didn’t they end up putting a terrorist on trial in NYC and nobody even noticed?

  27. An Obama win:

    A federal judge today sided with President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign and ordered Ohio to allow early voting on the three days prior to the Nov. 6 election to all voters.

    U.S. District Court Senior Judge Peter C. Economus ordered Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted not to enforce a state law passed last year that closed that window to in-person early voting to anyone but members of the military and their families.

  29. What’s been bugging me the most about Clint’s performance art last night is the fact that it actually was allowed to happen.

    Follow me here; the 82-year old icon shows up and tells Romney(ites) that he’s just gonna wing it. Srsly? In something so tightly controlled as a national convention broadcast in primetime? No, this is Romney once again acquiescing because he’s a coward with absolutely no spine and no sense of awareness.

    Here’s the proof: Did NO ONE in the campaign ask why Clint needed the chair prop on the stage? And if they asked, and Clint told them why, they STILL let him do it? You can’t tell me that among others, Sheldon Adelson wouldn’t order Mitt around like a house servant.

    • I wouldn’t think of the campaign as innocent bystanders. They probably pressured Clint into doing the bit because of his ad campaign that made him seem liberal. They probably gave him a a tip sheet or something and now they’re jumping ship like the rats they are.

  30. Yesterday, Michael Moore threw in the towel and said we better get used to saying, “President Romney.” Then he saw Clint Eastwood’s performance art last night:

    “Speaking to Invisible Obama last night, in a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech & Chong, Clint Eastwood was able to drive home to tens of millions of viewers the central message of this year’s Republican National Convention: We Are Delusional and Detached from Reality. Vote for Us!

    The footage of Eastwood rambling and mumbling to his “Harvey”—President Obama—will be played to audiences a hundred years from now as the Most Bizarre Convention Moment Ever. The people of the future will know nothing about Dirty Harry or Josey Wales or Million Dollar Baby. They will know about the night a crazy old man hijacked a national party’s most important gathering so he could literally tell the president to go do something to himself (i.e. fuck himself). In those few moments (and these days, it only takes a few moments—see Anthony Weiner), he completely upended and redefined how he’ll be remembered by younger and future generations.

    A few years ago, at the annual National Board of Review film awards held at Tavern on the Green in New York, I was there to hand out one of the honors. When it came time for Eastwood to accept his, he went up to the microphone and growled to me in front of the audience, “If you ever show up at my house with that camera, I’ll shoot you on sight.” The audience laughed, I laughed, but the person who issued the threat wasn’t laughing. That creeped me out a bit. I made sure never to go stand on Clint Eastwood’s lawn.

    But as I said, the best outcome from the incident last night was that it showed just how out of touch Republicans are these days. It’s as if they want a divorce from us, the American mainstream, so they can go live in the land of legitimate rapes and ice caps that don’t melt. Most Americans don’t live there on Planet Koo-Koo, and I don’t suspect many will be visiting there any time soon.

    Thanks, Clint, you made our day!”

  31. This just goes too far:
    “People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath.
    But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer … It’s not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn’t have his own — and they won’t be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that.

    It’s an understandable thing …”

    http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/31/785271/priest-blames-child-victims/

  33. From the Guardian:

    Among others who seemed to wonder if the actor was behaving like someone from another planet was George Takei – Sulu in the original Star Trek – who said he was, in response, “drafting a DNC speech to [an] imaginary Romney in an empty factory”.

  34. This is the second full Moon of the month.

    From Tim Huntington’s Webnectar photography

    The almost full moon rises behind the Lick Observatory in San Jose, CA.
    Taken earlier this evening. (8/30/2012)

  35. “We’re here at the Republican National Convention, where an empty chair has just eaten an aging Hollywood icon’s reputation…” Wonkette

    • Makes me so crazy. My father would have a fit when we did that sort of thing as children. Proof money can’t buy class.

      • I didn’t hear it at first, but he did it so many times that I began anticipating it. Now I’m hearing it when other people speak. :roll:

  38. Well my baby is at college and my husband just left to go fishing. You’d think I’d have something fun planned to do.

  40. Still crazy after all these years. I’ve been waiting for others to ferret out the best/worst bits of the official GOP platform and this one is pretty sickening though not surprising. They have drawn anew the line in the sand on ANY form of federal firearm regulations. Being a, usually, sane person it seems quite obvious to me that, when you have an endless parade of psychopaths opening fire on crowds with weapons they bought legally, it’s time to change the laws. At the very least we should discuss possible changes to said laws but it is well and truly off the table.

    http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/31/783141/gop-platform-endorses-high-capacity-clips-used-in-aurora-and-tuscon-mass-shootings/

    • If anybody on the right (for they are the ones really pushing this pro-gun agenda) can truthfully cite a single instance in which a law-abiding citizen lost his life (or a family member’s life) because his clip ran out of bullets, then they might have a valid point.

      • And it would still be a bad point because about the only scenario where that might occur is when the “bad guy” has a bigger clip that he probably bought anonymously on line or at a gun show or flea market.

        I don’t know if the local laws have changed in the 20 years or so since I went to a flea market but there was a guy who sold nothing but 30 and 60 round clips for AR15s and 500 round boxes of military surplus ammo for same. I was, comparatively, a lot less of a “lefty” back then but I still thought it was madness that could only end badly.

    • Mitt’s gonna raise our taxes…. to the tune of about $2000 per family of four to start, but it could go as high as $4000.

  42. Wouldn’t it be great if one of the major “news” networks hired the staffs from The Daily Show and Colbert Report and charged them with bringing integrity back to TV journalism? There is more stinging commentary in these two bits than the whole damn “librul media” has seemed to produce in any given election year.

    http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-august-29-2012/rnc-2012—the-road-to-jeb-bush-2016—the-republican-platform

    http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/colbert-slams-media-giving-ryans-lying-con

    • The sad fact is that those who are even considering voting for Mittens simply don’t care if he lies as long as he keeps them mad at the black guy. I think Mittens and R-Ayn could serve roast human fetuses on the Capital steps while having sex with each other and it still wouldn’t even register with the 27%ers.

  48. Bad news for Obama, and the country:

    A new report from the National Employment Law Project finds that low-wage jobs, paying $13.83 per hour or less, have dominated the recovery to date. In many cases, they appear to be replacing higher-paying jobs that were lost in the first place.

  49. Reacting to the controversy surrounding Rep. Todd Akin’s controversial comments regarding rape and abortion, former “Saturday Night Live” star and conservative activist Victoria Jackson said on Wednesday that if she were raped she would have the baby because it “would be a blessing,” noting that the baby “has its own DNA” and is “not the father’s DNA.”

    FACEPALM

    • Don’t know much about history. Don’t know much biology. Don’t know much about a science book.

    • Vikki just might be the stupidest/craziest Reichwhiner who actually get’s quoted by anyone. So, of course, she’s a big favorite of inSeanitty. Plus, I’m pretty sure that she is past her child bearing years and I can’t imagine any potential rapist being able to complete the crime if she just kept talking. Even back when she was relatively cute that voice would have shut me down cold.

  54. WIN tickets to Whisky Luxe, worth £125 each – the most exclusive whisky tasting event ever held in Scotland takes place in Edinburgh on 7 September. 5 pairs to win in The Scotsman tomorrow.

    gummich, it’s a wall full o’ whisky – just for you!

  55. Rip Nomney?

    Romney is taking time off from the campaign. He’s too tired to be president.

  56. You should watch Maher tonight.. He completely destroys wingnut filmmaker Dinesh D’souza in the one-on-one interview at the start.

  57. I wish I had a dollar for every time GOP flak Ron Christie says, “the fact of the matter.”

  58. Pathetic. I just got to see listen to this speech. We had a business man in the White House for 8 years. His name is George W. Bush and he wrecked the fucking economy. Ryan says that we shouldn’t focus on what Obama inherited and instead focus on the now. The economy has improved in the since Obama took office so I see no reason to make a change in Washington, DC.

Comments are closed.