We must respect that Hollywood stars put their charisma to the service of a particular political option, but what is reprehensible is not telling the truth, as Clint Eastwood did in Florida. In his short speech he eclipsed even Romney’s momentum and it has raised some criticism among American commentators: the actor ridiculed Obama in front of the republican delegates by pretending a dialogue with the President next to an empty chair. His undoubted interpretive skills excited the audience and thus the people in Tampa believed all lies implicit by the artist.
Eastwood remembered sarcastically the tears of excitement on the night of Obama's victory, and associated them –in a very cheap, easy rhetorical commonplace– to the tears caused by the high number of unemployed, which is undeniably the weakest balance of the Democrat administration. He also said that businessmen, not attorneys, should presidents as if the former were a guarantee of greater efficiency and better management. He caricatured Vice President Joe Biden, whom he described as "the intellect" of the White House, and said that he was "a grin with a body behind". But the climax of cynicism arrived when Eastwood criticized the Obama’s broken promises, and among them he mentioned not having closed Guantanamo, forgetting that the Republicans were strongly against its closure. Then he was mocking the Government when it proposed the "stupid idea" of judging a 11-S terrorist in downtown New York: if the trial could not be held at Guantanamo it had to be held in US territory, but the Republican opposition to that possibility was relentless and exhausting. The highest point of hypocrisy finally arrived when Eastwood said it was good to have withdrawn from Iraq, but said that instead of setting a date for withdrawal from Afghanistan it would be better leave the country "tomorrow", ignoring that it was George W. Bush who mired the U.S. in the unpopular and discredited war on terror.
The party conventions are a platform to gain exposure to media and to attract followers, but a discourse based on falsehood and distortion brings the perpetrators closer to populism, demagoguery and, ultimately, the ridiculous, even if it comes from someone with the charisma of a star as Clint Eastwood.
