Clint Eastwood: You can be badass and wrong at the same time.

Finally, Mitt has a celebrity endorsement that’s not tainted by batshit craziness.

The “Dirty Harry” star and Oscar-winning director of “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby” endorsed the Republican presidential candidate Friday night during a Sun Valley fundraiser.

“I think the country needs a boost,” Eastwood told The Associated Press as he joined other Romney supporters for the private campaign event.

In February, Eastwood told Fox News that he wasn’t supporting any politician at that time. Some saw the “halftime in America” ad he made for the Super Bowl as a nod toward President Barack Obama. Eastwood responded then by saying he was not “politically affiliated” with the president.

“Now more than ever do we need Gov. Romney. I’m going to be voting for him,” Eastwood told Romney supporters Friday night.

“He just made my day,” Romney said. “What a guy.”

(Snip.)

Eastwood, 82, said he hoped Romney would restore “a decent tax system that we need badly … so that there’s a fairness and people are not pitted against one another as who’s paying taxes and who isn’t. (Bold mine.)

Then obviously, Mr. Eastwood has not read about Romney’s tax plan.

The report — produced by researchers at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center — illustrates just how difficult it would be to recoup government revenue lost under Romney’s plan.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s tax plan calls for 20% cuts to today’s Bush-era income tax rates. He would also eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Those tax cuts would lead to a sharp decline in government revenue. Yet Romney insists he will make up the difference in-part by limiting deductions, exemptions and credits currently available to top-level income earners.

Romney refuses to say which tax breaks he plans to eliminate — but the Tax Policy Center report indicates the plan would force the tax burden to shift toward lower and middle-class Americans.

“A revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney has proposed … would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers,” the report concludes.

Sadly, this means only one thing, that Clint Eastwood has no idea what Mitt Romney’s tax plan is all about.
And the sad part is that in the long run voting for Romney is going to hurt Eastwood too.
In order to have a vibrant film industry, you need a strong middle class that has both the leisure time and disposable income to go to the movies on a weekly basis.  And right now, the major studios are concentrating mostly on big budget four-quadrant movies which are decidedly not the kind of movies that Clint Eastwood makes.
And somewhere down the line, Warner Brothers, despite their long history with Eastwood may have to decide to have a talk about his future. Unless he decides to get into the Superhero game by starring in a live action film of Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” which given both his age and “Get it on The First Take” filmmaking style could be far less awesome than it sounds.

What ever my differences with Obama, it needs to be said that based on what we’ve seen so far that Mitt Romney is absolutely the wrong person to be President right now. Especially based on the fact that he’s bringing back Bush’s foreign policy team!
I’m a fan of Mr. Eastwood’s.  And I have nothing but respect for his place in film history.
But he is on the wrong side on this.  And all I can hope is that he’s smart enough to realize it.

EDIT: 8-3  Added Bold type to a sentence.

EDIT: 8-4 Damn it, I went and cross posted to the Daily Kos again.