The Empty Chair
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger at The Atlantic well worth reading, suggests the significance of Clint Eastwood’s RNC performance is the behind-the-curtain peak at the Romney campaign it provides. In this spectacle we can see the message behind the script: ‘an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama…an old white man arguing with an adversary he lacks the ability to see.’

Coates then provides the following quote, reminding us of the mean-spirited, inaccurate, internally contradictory, and unpatriotic claims the opposition has used these past three years to grind government to a halt.

“To paraphrase a commenter from a few years back, in GOP eyes, Barack Obama is a spellbinding orator always in need of teleprompter; the disciple of a radical Christian preacher who reigns like a secular-atheist determined to bring about a new era of Islamo-fascism; an Ivy-league wimp hailing from the gutters of Chicago; a white culture-hating racist who is not really black, but half-white; an anti-military peacenik who pals around with terrorists, who insists on killing terrorists, who insists on bragging about killing terrorists; an avowed Marxist specializing in the shadow arts of crony-capitalism and Leninist theories of banker bail-outs.”

Familiar?   Sadly yes, because we can remember hearing these over and over on the nightly news when it was time for the Republican response…instead of let’s help American families, the only response they could come up with was one that is captured in Clint’s image of the empty chair.