Clint Eastwood was faking?

So there's a theory that Clint Eastwood's bizarre, rambling speech at the Republican National Convention was actually a very clever con.

I fully believe that what Eastwood did at the RNC was all on purpose, carefully planned and crafted to the very end.

See, Clint Eastwood has for a long time described himself as an “Eisenhower Republican” and “Libertarian.” He is in favor of gay rights, non-interventionism, individualism; there aren’t many points of convergence between those philosophies and what Mitt Romney stands for. In fact, there are none. That’s why I thought it was so odd that Eastwood decided to endorse Romney and speak for him at the warmongering-NeoCon-meeting function par excellence.
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at various moments in his speech — moments which went ignored by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, eager to bask in their projection bias — Eastwood rags on Obama for failing to come through on his promise of being a peace president and bringing the troops home, and also for failing to close Gitmo. If Clint Eastwood is not senile and doesn’t live in a cave, he knows for a fact that Mitt Romney’s position on the wars is pretty much the same as Obama’s, and that, if it were up to Romney, he’d probably expand the Gitmo base to engulf the entire Caribbean.

Also, a lot of his criticisms toward Obama (his background as a lawyer, for instance), are very much applicable to Mitt Romney himself.

And finally, if Clint’s objective was to draw attention to himself and shine a light on the ridiculousness of the entire convention and the pretense that Mitt Romney is any different from Obama, he largely succeeded.

The cui bono? argument does have a certain seductive power.

Clint Eastwood single-handedly threw the carefully scripted Republican convention off course: delaying Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech past the start of prime time, making his speech the focus of media attention rather than Mitt Romney's, and making the Republicans and Republican conventioneers look more boorish, ridiculous and hypocritical than even John Stewart ever could. However, his artifice was such that the Republicans had to defend his performance and could not attack him.

As dozens of movie villains have learned, never underestimate Clint Eastwood.

Joking aside, I'd thought it was a charming speculation, but a bit outlandish ... and impossible to demonstrate, anyway. But an article in the Carmel Pine Cone almost gives the game away.

After a week as topic No. 1 in American politics, former Carmel Mayor Clint Eastwood said the outpouring of criticism from left-wing reporters and liberal politicians after his appearance at the Republican National Convention last Thursday night, followed by an avalanche of support on Twitter and in the blogosphere, is all the proof anybody needs that his 12-minute discourse achieved exactly what he intended it to.
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Romney’s campaign aides asked for details about what Eastwood would say to the convention.

“They vet most of the people, but I told them, ‘You can’t do that with me, because I don’t know what I’m going to say,’ ” Eastwood recalled.

Emphasis mine.

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Update: Clint comments:

If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re gonna have to take what they get.

Not a clincher. But the theory is still in play. And it's convinced Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's smarter than I am.