What The Hell Just Happened?

"I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine, in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on"

--Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood"



"They were saying,
I just thought,
this was great.
Everybody is trying,
Oprah was crying."

--Actual Clint Eastwood, last night at the Republican National Convention

Yeah. This happened.

Clint Eastwood, the secret guest at Thursday’s closing night of the Republican convention, surprised everyone with a head-scratching, ad libbed speech in which he pretended to talk to and make fun of an invisible President Obama on the stage.

In an eleven-minute speech, Eastwood bashed Obama for everything from failing to turn the economy around to proposing that terror suspects be tried in civilian courts in New York City. Eastwood, at times mumbling and fumbling over his words, held a mock conversation with Obama as represented by an empty chair on the stage with him, even pretending that the nonexistent Obama was telling him to shut up.

“I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here,” he said, motioning to the chair. “And he’s, uh, I, I was just gonna ask him a couple of questions.”

The questions, however, did not go so smoothly.

“So Mr. President, how do you, uh, how do you handle, uh, how do you handle promises that you made when you were running for election?” Eastwood said to the empty chair. “And how do you handle it, uh, how do you handle it, I mean, what do you say to people?”

Andy Kaufman could not have done a better piece of performance art. Not with all of John Belushi's drugs and Richard Pryor's anger. Clint Eastwood trolled tens of millions of people by losing a ten minute argument with an imaginary Barack Obama. In fact, @InvisibleObama got thirty-seven thousand followers last night on Twitter. It was the greatest thing I have ever seen. Ever. Of all time.