Clint Eastwood Super Bowl Commerical: It’s Halfwit Time in America

The Granite Sentry

The biggest question viewers had after the latest Super Bowl wasn’t about the Patriots or Giants. It was “How the heck did Obama sucker Clint Eastwood into being in that awful political commercial?” The Granite Sentry, having done the analysis and the homework, might just have an explanation for Eastwood’s appearance: “It’s Half-Wit Time in America.”

February 8, 2012
THE GRANITE SENTRY
It’s Half-Wit Time in America

So now Clint Eastwood has gotten himself in trouble.

His Super Bowl halftime commercial for Chrysler — “Halftime in America” — is drawing fire as a thinly disguised advertisement for an Obama second term. Eastwood says no. “There is no spin in that ad. I am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama,” he says.

And that’s probably true. Eastwood has supported candidates and causes across the political spectrum, and has made Libertarian noises lately without endorsing anyone in particular. He plays a no-nonsense conservative sort of guy, but has come down in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, environmental conservation and gay marriage. On the other hand he supported John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, not that doing so gets him any Right Wing feathers in his cap.

In other words he’s another example of a someone who tends Right but doesn’t really understand why. That makes him easy prey for Liberals who use people’s impatience with political squabbling to ease them toward Leftist ideas they paint as moderate compromise. It’s the meet-in-the-middle fallacy Liberals have been using to inch the nation toward collectivism now for decades. “The middle” keeps moving to the Left.

Liberals have mastered using images like those in Eastwood’s commercial — hardy Americans, families with freckle-faced kids full of promise, robust firemen, small-town courthouses, cheerleaders, grandmas and grandpas, yeoman farmers and hard-handed working types — to advance far Left principles that, followed to their conclusion, would pull the rug out from under the whole thing.

Democrats are right when they say conservatives use the same images in their own commercials, implying that we’re all working for the same thing. But the difference is we actually mean it.

An example? President Obama is on the air live from the White House as this is being written, surrounded by fresh-faced youngsters and plumping for a new initiative that MSNBC says will “support math and science teachers.” Sounds great, except that his is the party that A.) supports parasitical teachers’ unions with work rules that make decent education nearly impossible; B.) endorses policies that refocus schools on social programs instead of real learning; C.) enacts social programs that undercut families, law enforcement, and all decent civil order. All of these things tend to render education initiatives pointless — no matter how well they’re crafted or how many sharp young scholars they recruit to stand in the background and look promising.

Folks like Eastwood fundamentally misunderstand who they’re dealing with in these matters. No doubt he really believes that people he thinks are “moderates” worry with him about “division, discord and blame,” as he says in the commercial. He thinks that like him, they want to “come together,” to “pull together,” to “come from behind.”

He doesn’t understand that when they say, “working together,” they mean doing exactly what the Democrats want. Nor does he get that when they talk about “division, discord and blame,” they’re referring to anything the Republicans do to slow their march to collectivism.

Hopefully Eastwood won’t feel too bad about being rolled this way by the Left. It happens all the time to establishment Republicans. Remember the “bipartisan group of six” U.S. Senators who last spring were meeting privately to save the nation from the debt crisis? They didn’t. And it came as no surprise when the Republican members of the group emerged with “kick-me” signs on their backs and their underwear pulled up over their heads.

It’s a wardrobe malfunction that happens every time they try to work with their friends across the aisle.

It’s bound to happen; they may believe in working together, but the only thing committed Democrats believe in is working them over.

by Granite Sentry
images: dbkp;

The Granite Sentry writes regularly at The Granite Sentry (where “The ruling class hates backtalk and sass. Let’s get started.”).

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