Thank You Clint Eastwood, For Making My Day — “The Bad, The Worse, and The Ugly”

“Dirty Harry” has finally run out of bullets.

He went 13 minutes instead of only five, he got unlucky, and ended up looking like a punk on national television.

If Clint Eastwood’s act last night would have instead been an audition, his movie career might have been over in an instant.

Yes, it was that bad.

Eastwood’s appearance at the critical moment of the final night of the 2012 Republican National Convention was quite possibly the most painful moment in any political theater within the past twenty years.  Reminiscent of Admiral John Stockdale’s cringe-inducing verbal drool in the 1992 Vice Presidential debate, the iconic 82-year-old actor took last night’s stage at the very twinkling of what was supposed to be national coronation.  Instead, his stammering speech ended up as such a distraction, he made a totally incoherent Stockdale seem like William F. Buckley, by comparison.

No one could have possibly seen it coming.  In fact, the buildup was right on schedule.

For the better part of two hours, the Republican Party establishment had to be creaming all over themselves.  Their presidential nominee had largely been humanized for the very first time (no small feat) to tens of millions of viewers and voters – many tuning into the political season for the first time.  This was largely achieved by roasting up the all-too-familiar emotional chestnuts manipulatively designed to somehow transform a cold-hearted venture capitalist who made hundeds of millions busting up companies and outsourcing jobs into a warm and fuzzy stuffed teddy bear – you know, an electable human being.  Sort of like a political Frankenstein.

Misson largely accomplished, next one of Hollywood’s most revered film legends — particularly to right-wing gun nuts – took the grand stage and then went completey fucking bonkers batshit crazy.   Watching the ad lib act and witnessing the carnage of a cherished actor and director who has given society so many memorable roles and memories, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.