No, I don’t tweet. Sometimes I think it might be fun to do, but I don’t think fast enough to be clever. But to save some time for people, I have complied some of the best tweets about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair rant/ramble last night at the Republican convention. I was inspired by an article posted this afternoon on the Nation by Ilyse Hogue, Anatomy of a meme
Surprise guest, Eastwood, was reportedly given three minutes to speak, but spent the better part of fifteen minutes of prime time coverage ranting at an empty chair that was supposed to be an invisible President Obama. Pain was visible on the faces of candidate and campaign operative alike as it became clear that these confused ravings of the famous octogenarian were going to be the stand out performance from an otherwise carefully orchestrated week.
And that it is. Within moments of Eastwood’s start, @InvisibleObama had a twitter account with a picture of an empty chair. By the end of the speech, the chair had almost 17,000 followers. It now has 48,000.
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Even the President got in the fun when his twitter account posted a picture of the back of the President sitting is his chair, with the tag line “This seat’s taken.”
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In my opinion, the most succinct and spot-on insight came from a Jamelle Bouie tweet, “”This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.”
And here are some more taken from Hogue’s article.
Zach Braff: Now all my chairs want to be interviewed too.
FastLaugh: Give Clint Eastwood a break… The RNC asked him to speak about ObamaCare and he thought they said ObamaChair…
Bob Newhart: I heard that Clint Eastwood was channeling me at the RNC. My lawyers and I are drafting our lawsuit…
Josh Rogin
This from Andrew Sullivan’s blog
And Jed Lewison at the Daily Kos comments