CPAC So Far: The Conservative Miscreant Conference Doesn’t Disappoint

Posted by Mark NC on March 15, 2013 at 1:22 pm. 5 Comments :

In the first two days of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the right-wingnut contingent was out in force and was not holding back on their animus and denial. They still believe that the reasons for their losing are related to poor messaging, not poor messages. So even with the highest rated cable news network blasting their propaganda 24/7, and polls showing that the American people overwhelmingly prefer the solutions advanced by Democrats, Republicans continue to cling to ideas that have been soundly rejected by voters.

That is, of course, good news for Democrats and President Obama. The more that rightist stars shine their light on absurdities and overt hatred, the more people will be repulsed and gravitate toward the left. Some examples of the tone-deaf rhetoric emanating from the CPAC ballrooms include these utterances from their heroes:

Donald Trump is very unhappy that the social safety net, that he and the right would love to see unravel, cannot be loosened without sacrificing votes:

Allen West, the guy who says there are 70 card-carrying communists in congress, also thinks that his battle against his ideological opponents on the left is analogous to fighting terrorists.

And Marco Rubio doesn’t want to be perceived as a bigot just because he holds bigoted views:

It is that sort of demented rancor expressed by these GOP Tea-holics that is keeping the party from corralling any support, particularly from minorities and young voters. Yet after throwing such temper tantrums, whose only purpose is to malign their perceived enemies, they persist in the delusion that their policy prescription is fine and it’s just their media, and in some cases their candidate selection, that is flawed.

No matter what they say about their presentation of conservatism, they had a fair shot with “severely conservative” Mitt Romney, and they lost. They had the most powerful name in media at their back, and they lost. The 2012 election pitted Obama against a right-wing onslaught that hit every plank in the far-right platform, and they lost badly. [Note: Although MSNBC and CNN both aired Romney’s CPAC speech live, Fox News ignored it entirely]

CPAC is doing precisely what it was intended to do: Spotlight the cream of the rightist crop. They cannot whine about deficient messaging when this is the all-star roster they themselves put on the field. The only problem that conservatives have is that their ideas are stuck in an archaic past, and they didn’t even work then. When they realize that and begin to adopt sensible policies that the American people favor, they might win back some support. But as things stand today, they are stubbornly holding fast to outdated and unpopular schemes designed to benefit the rich. And judging from the performances at CPAC, they don’t plan to change their grating tune.

CPAC: The Conservative Political Action Conference Sets Its Sights On The Future?

Posted by Mark NC on March 12, 2013 at 12:11 pm. 3 Comments :

This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference begins Thursday and promises to be a treasure trove of comedy material that will give a big boost to Democrats and progressives.

Having learned nothing whatsoever from the 2012 election, CPAC has dubbed this year’s event “America’s Future: The Next Generation of Conservatives.” Then they loaded up the schedule with fresh-faced Tea-publicans like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Allen West, Rick Santorum, and Donald Trump. Even Dick Morris is making an appearance. It’s a blast forward in time all the way to 2008 which, for the GOP, actually seems like the future since they are still acting as if it’s 1808.

If the allocation of speaking time for CPAC’s illustrious guests is any indication, they are firmly endorsing the backwards views of the conservative movement’s most moth-eaten mouthpieces. Palin and Trump, for instance, have been allocated 16 minutes and 14 minutes respectively. However, rising starlet Marco Rubio is getting only 11 minutes. That’s still better than Chris Christie who has been allotted zero minutes since he wasn’t even invited to attend. Not to worry though, there will be plenty to keep attendees occupied, including tributes to Andrew Breitbart and Ronald Reagan, and highly anticipated sessions with the NRA and the Tea Party.

What’s more, the tenor of the event is holding fast to the antiquated notions of Armageddon that were such a prominent part of the past four years of fear mongering. The conference is jam-packed with thrilling and frightful seminars like “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?,” “Are We Back on the Road to Serfdom?,” “Stop THIS: Threats, Harrassment, Intimidation, Slander, and Bullying from the Obama Administration,” “The United Nations vs. the United States: the End Run Around the American Way of Life,” and “Is America Coming Apart?.” I can’t wait to hear the answers to those questions.

Adding to the gaiety (bad choice of words?) of this ultra-modern affair is the dress code distributed by a media strategist in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Fashion, being one of the things for which right-wingers are best known, is not neglected this year. That’s why they are nixing T-shirts, jeans, sneakers, miniskirts, strapless necklines, halter tops, Uggs, Tom’s Shoes, leggings, and fancy shorts. See the colorful Infographic.

This is shaping up to be the most exciting CPAC yet. So stay tuned for updates from the speeches and panels that are surely going to advance the cause of conservatism into the nineteenth century.

Sarah Palin’s Top Seven CPAC Hack Attacks And Lies

Posted by Mark NC on February 12, 2012 at 12:00 pm. 7 Comments :

There is no better example of the right’s embrace of idiocy than the rise of Sarah Palin. Conservatives take great pains to refudiate attacks on her intelligence (or lack thereof), but the very fact that they have to rush to her defense so often is evidence of her stupefying ignorance. You never see conservatives forced to defend Karl Rove on those grounds. Liberals may strongly disagree with him but they don’t doubt his IQ.

Palin, on the other hand, is a walking fountain of embarrassing witlessisms. And her keynote speech yesterday at CPAC contributed another mother lode of lunacy. As was to be expected, the bulk of her bluster was aimed squarely at Barack Obama, whom she can only see in terms of evil and strident anti-Americanism. This approach is well received by the simple-minded audience at CPAC that regards cracks about community organizing as worthy of a standing ovation. Surprisingly, the crowd was unfazed by Palin’s use of Satan’s own speaking device: the TelePrompTer.

However, Palin saved some of her bile for fellow Republican Mitt Romney. She did not mention him by name, but it was clear to whom she was referring when she said that she hoped the nominating process would continue, even to the convention. And it was likewise obvious that Palin was smacking Romney when she said that…

“Our candidate must be someone who can instinctively turn right to constitutional, conservative principles. It’s too late in the game to teach it or spin it at this point. It’s either there or it isn’t.”

But the real entertainment was spread throughout Palin’s address. While there was virtually nothing of substance, there was an abundance of blatant applause lines that fed the Pavlovian lust of the CPACers. Here are just a few of the most mentally deficient snippets from her harangue:

1) [Obama] promised to transform America, and that’s one promise he kept, transforming a shining city on a hill into a sinking ship.
Remember how shiny America was in 2008 when the McCain/Palin ticket was so soundly defeated? The economy was in free fall, we were bleeding jobs, and there were two wars in progress. Obama took command of this ship after Bush and the GOP had already run it into an iceberg, and he has managed to keep it afloat and steer it back into safer waters.

2) When I listened to his State of the Union last month, I was really struck that he barely mentioned unemployment.
Which State of the Union was she listening to? It certainly wasn’t the one Obama delivered where he mentioned “jobs” 33 times. Her dreadful comprehension skills may explain why she was unable to answer a gotcha question like “What do you read?”

3) He’ll invest your money in bullet trains to nowhere, but he’ll stop Boeing from building airplanes anywhere.
It takes balls for Palin to reference the “bridge to nowhere” that was a boondoggle she supported in her home state of Alaska. And it’s no less ballsy to berate initiatives like high-speed rail that would create jobs and improve the infrastructure for commerce. Also, The NLRB decision to oppose Boeing’s plan to to move their facilities to South Carolina was intended to save the jobs of workers that Boeing proposed to abandon in Washington state.

4) We have a better job plan and it’s called the free market. And it worked before this president, and it will work again after this president.
Well, except for this:

5) He says that we need more of his financial regulations. We say go ask MF Global customers how happy they are with his regulatory agencies. Where were they when Jon Corzine lost $1.2 billion of customer funds?
Exactly! Where were Obama’s regulatory agencies? They were tied up by Palin’s Republican pals in Congress who refused to pass the bills that would create them or to confirm the department heads who would manage them. And isn’t Palin thoughtful for showing her concern about a billion dollars lost by wealthy hedge fund investors, but no such concern for hundreds of billions lost by average American homeowners?

6) We’re gonna put our confidence in the strength of our armed forces, not the hollow promises of our adversaries and not the cleverness of our diplomats and our bureaucrats.
So Palin advocates only military solutions to foreign policy disputes. She just can’t abide clever diplomats that could defuse an international crisis and avoid putting American lives at risk, not to mention saving billions of dollars that would be spent at war. Something tells me that even our armed forces would rather rely on diplomacy first.

7) We’ve suffered massive job losses out there. But Washington is hiring.
Actually, there have been 3,000,000 jobs created in the private sector in the past two years. Government jobs, however, have declined by 2.6% during the Obama administration. That’s a record. Obama has done more to shrink government than even Ronald Reagan.

Sitting through Palin’s speech was an excruciating ordeal. Her screechy whine was itself torturous, but the ignorance infused with every sentence, and the cheers it elicited from the undiscriminating crowd, was like aural tasering. Imagine my relief when she came to the obligatory “God bless America” and the end was in sight. However, the final punch line was her selection of Shania Twain’s “Not Just A Pretty Face” to accompany her exit from the stage. It’s amazing that the ego that approved that song can fit into her miniaturized brain.

Andrew Breitbart At CPAC: I Have Videos Of Obama In College

Posted by Mark NC on February 11, 2012 at 4:11 pm. 7 Comments :

As if Andrew Breitbart’s performance before some Occupy protesters wasn’t pathetic enough, the terminally choleric pundit delivered an incoherent rant from the CPAC podium. He spent much of the time rambling in sentence fragments, struggling to make sense. But one portion of his speech teased what may be his next video crusade. And, no, I’m not talking about the hilariously twisted “Hating Breitbart” documentary that was announced at the conference. I’m referring to Breitbart’s tantalizing claim to have unearthed videos of President Obama in college.

“I have videos. This election we’re going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out, that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver ponytails in the 1980s, like Bill (Ayers) and Bernadine Dohrn, who said one day we would have the presidency, and the rest of us slept as they plotted.”

OMG! Obama in college plotting with Ayers to become president. That’s blockbuster material. I can just picture it: A twenty year old Obama meeting with the middle-aged Ayers, drafting a scheme that would see Obama elected to the presidency thirty years later. What foresight and commitment they must have had. Especially since they never met until long after Obama graduated from Harvard Law and eventually moved to Chicago where Ayers lived.

It is also interesting that Breitbart would characterize his comrades on the right as sleeping through the eighties. You know, the eighties when Ronald Reagan was president and conservatism was at its peak. That would explain a lot, like how Reagan got elected president in the first place. Little did they know that liberals were holed up conspiring to take over the free world – thirty years in the future – by electing a black man with no birth certificate to the presidency. A brilliant plan that couldn’t possibly fail. It makes you wonder if there might not be a young, undocumented, Mexican atheist currently putting together a plan with billionaire drug lords to occupy the White House in 2040.

For Breitbart to make these allegations involving Bill Ayers is curious since he just attended a dinner party thrown by Ayers a few days ago. Breitbart was invited to the party by Tucker Carlson who paid $2,500 in a charity auction to have dinner with Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. Breitbart, ever the gracious guest, told Eric Bolling on the Fox Business Network (whose show was just canceled) that Ayers was a great conversationalist, an incredible chef, and a sociopath.

Another guest for dinner, Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard, posted his recollections of the affair with a distinct and buoyant whine about not having had enough time to harangue his hosts. He ate their food (personally prepared by Ayers), drank their wine, and enjoyed a scrumptious desert of apple pie topped with Ben & Jerry’s AmeriCone Dream (the flavor inspired by Stephen Colbert). But apparently two hours and a free gourmet meal is not deserving of appreciation. How rude of the Ayers’ not to take a seat in the dunking booth and allow their rightist guests to harass them for another hour or two about things they did forty years ago.

Which brings us back to the videos that Breitbart claims to have in his possession. If they are anything like the videos he has released in the past, we can be assured that they will utterly lack any truthful representation of events. Like the ACORN videos that were deliberately edited to create false and negative impressions of people who were unselfishly helping low income citizens to vote and find housing for their families. Like the Shirley Sherrod video that was cut to make her look like a racist when the the whole, unedited video proved just the opposite. Breitbart’s history with video exposes is a cavalcade of conscious deceit.

I have doubts that any videos of Obama’s college years will ever actually be released, but if they are it seems unlikely that they will have any relevance this many years later. Breitbart once famously declared that he would “take down the institutional left” in three weeks. That was two years ago. He’s a radioactive bundle of bluster and petulant anger. And even though he has threatened his liberal enemies saying that “We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns”, I’m not losing any sleep over it.

Andrew Breitbart vs. Occupy: Behave Yourselves You Filthy Freaks

Posted by Mark NC on February 11, 2012 at 1:24 pm. 10 Comments :

Every year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) there are demonstrations of ludicrous and hateful behavior by the nation’s rightist luminaries. Already this year we have seen three of the candidates for the Republican nomination for president take the stage to throw red meat invectives at President Obama and other Democrats, to the delight of the ravenous crowd.

But nothing has yet come close to the maniacal tantrum thrown by Internet mogul wannabe, Andrew Breitbart. And it was all caught on tape:

Breitbart often tries to present himself as someone who wants to be taken seriously by the media. He thinks he is a credible journalist and media critic. But his behavior belies even the notion that he is mentally stable. By repeating incessantly, at high decibels, his demand that Occupy protesters behave themselves, he is not exactly a model of civil behavior. But then he escalates his tirade to inexplicably accuse the protesters of rape and murder. He becomes so completely unhinged that security guards intervene to remove him from the scene.

It boggles the mind that so-called respectable news networks provide Breitbart with a platform to spew his bile. When CNN, for instance, puts him on the air they are validating him as a credible commentator, despite his resume that is replete with hostility and brazen dishonesty. This latest episode of frenzied derangement ought to put an end to his media exploitation but, unfortunately, that will probably not be the case. Too many media executives (like CNN’s Ken Jautz) are more concerned with ratings generating controversy than they are with professionalism or journalistic ethics.

Ron Paul’s CPAC Poll Victory: What Does It Mean?

Posted by Mark NC on February 21, 2010 at 2:10 pm. 9 Comments :

A lot of jaws dropped yesterday when the organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference announced the results of their presidential straw poll (pdf).

In a surprise victory, Ron Paul far outpaced his GOP rivals with 31%. Mitt Romney, who has won in several previous CPAC polls came in second with 22%. Sarah Palin, a presumed conservative favorite, trailed badly with only 7%.

So what might have contributed to these unexpected results? For one thing, it is not possible to make general representations about the CPAC attendees. Only 2,395 of them (out of approximately 10,000) voted in the poll. That means that 70% abstained. And there was no effort to develop representative sampling, so the results can’t be extrapolated to the attendees at large.

Ron Paul has fired up a certain segment of conservatives with his independent streak and appeal to anti-government types. But he is also 74 years old (a year older than John McCain) and a plurality of CPAC voters (48%) were students. Apparently that demographic split didn’t hurt Paul. It may, in fact, point to the more anarchistic bent of youth, while older establishment conservatives lean toward the comfort food candidacy of Mitt Romney.

Some analysts have attributed Palin’s poor showing to her not showing. She announced weeks ago that she would not be attending CPAC in favor of the Tea Baggers Ball in Nashville. Of course there was nothing stopping her from going to both – except that the Tea Baggers paid her a hundred grand and CPAC is a gratis affair. Also, presidential hopefuls Tim Pawlenty, Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee all showed up, gave warmly received speeches, and finished below no-show Palin.

Some other questions posed in the poll may shed light on the presidential numbers. For instance, most voters (53%) were unsatisfied with the current crop of candidates. An overwhelming majority cite smaller government, a key Paul issue, as their main goal. Issues championed by Palin, like traditional values (9%) and national security (7%), were far less important to this crowd. And bombast seems to be out of favor judging by the high negatives of Glenn Beck (27%) and Rush Limbaugh (27%). You would think that number would get more attention. Nearly a third of CPACers have a negative view of their most prominent spokesmen. For some reason, Palin was not included in the favorability question. Not to worry. Perhaps that’s for the best as a recent poll showed that she is not particularly welcome in the 2012 race anyway. 71% said they did not want her to run. That included 56% of Republicans, 65% of Independents, and even 58% of conservatives.

So what does it all mean? The Hell if I know. The only thing that I come away from this with is the certainty that the roster of also-rans in this poll will shortly be adopting more of Ron Paul’s policies and rhetoric.

The Morning After: Glenn Beck’s CPAC Wake Up Call

Posted by Mark NC on February 21, 2010 at 10:19 am. 8 Comments :

I just thought I’d leave you with some of the wit and wisdom of Glenn Beck at CPAC. I am so tempted to leave the rest of this post blank, but…..

The man who identifies himself as a rodeo clown also says this:

“America is not a clown show. America is not a circus. America is an idea.”

Beck’s idea of America is pretty depressing:

“I have for four years now been ringing the bell. Economic Holocaust is coming. Economic day of reckoning is coming. And for a long time nobody would listen. Aw, he’s a crazy crackpot just trying to stir people up.”

Beck finds it tedious when no one listens to him:

“I’m tired of feeling like a freak in America and I know so many of you are too.”

His problem isn’t that no one is listening. It’s that they hear him all too well.

“We will be so tired. But when we put our head down on our pillow to go to sleep again that night, we can be happy because we know tomorrow it will again be morning in America.”

Awesome! We can all be happy because after we go to bed at night we will wake up and it will be morning. Who’da thunk? The problem is that Beck’s morning after is a continuation of the nightmare:

“It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding, hung-over, vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America. And it’s shaping up to be kind of a nasty day.”

Thanks for the inspirational sermon, Glenn.

CPAC Wacko: Glenn Beck Embraces Stagnation

Posted by Mark NC on February 20, 2010 at 9:53 pm. 4 Comments :

One thing you have to admire about Glenn Beck is that he never gets tired of fomenting the same fear and paranoia that made him what he is.

Even before today’s speech at CPAC, Beck teased his keynote with a video on his web site. He promised that he would discuss a 1938 pamphlet he found that urges Rhode Islanders to vote Communist. Now most people would struggle to find anything relevant about that to current events, but not Beck. He ties this old rag to contemporary liberals by noting that the tract uses the fearsome word “progress.” And we all know that conservatives are bitterly opposed to progress in any form. Beck’s opposition to progress is so extreme that he portrays it as a threat and likens it to virulent and deadly diseases:

“Republicans need to get away from progressives. It is the cancer in our Constitution.”

In his rush to demonize the notion of progress, Beck has now described the Constitution as a flawed and sickly document. This is a little surprising considering the glassy-eyed worship he generally extends to the Founders and their works. But now Beck regards the intellectual and political freedom the Constitution guarantees as a tumor that will consume and kill it.

In the actual CPAC address, Beck gave an audience of the faithful a warmed over version of his Fox News program. He included the cancer diagnosis. There wasn’t anything in the speech that he hasn’t repeated incessantly on TV for the past year. It’s astonishing that none of his congregation remembers that they have heard all of this many times before. Talk about short-term memory. Beck retraces the usual suspects of taxing and spending. He raises the frightening specter of economic Holocaust. He stirs nightmares of the worst of all creeping enemies: progressives. He exhumed Van Jones and introduced his blackboard to thunderous applause. He reiterated his message of impending doom invoking all the standard Beckisms and familiar cliches. He couldn’t have spent more than fifteen minutes working on this cut-and-paste job.

Beck also reprised his dramatic reading of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. That performance was first staged in Florida last November. It is a surreal misinterpretation of the poem’s meaning. In Beck’s mind those words are not an embrace of the world’s downtrodden that they may find peace and fellowship. It is a condemnation of inferiors that they may seek repair. That these diseased and broken souls may be healed. He literally described Liberty’s poem as “an insult” to foreign tyrants, rather than the appeal to hope that the rest of us heard. It is a vision that perfectly fits Beck’s fixation on creating idols and demons and saviors.

Democrats have recently been casting Republicans as the “Party of No.” That’s a fair representation based on the GOP’s penchant for obstructing every legislative proposal from the Democratic majority. Republicans have set new records for the use of the filibuster to the extent that many lazy analysts believe that 60 votes are required to pass bills in Congress and that 41 is a majority of the 100 seat Senate.

But I think there is a better name and symbol for today’s Republican Party and the rest of the CPAC crowd. A name that is in harmony with a movement that dismisses science, rejects evolution and believes that humans coexisted with dinosaurs. A symbol that embodies the anti-progress theme with which Beck is obsessed. This is a movement that celebrates ignorance and revels in stagnation. They are The Stagnatists.

The Stagnatican Party wants nothing more than to remain permanently mired in whatever mud hole they currently occupy. Stagnatism perfectly describes the party whose leaders now wear their sloth as a badge of honor. Stagnatists are against progress. And Glenn Beck spent the better part of an hour today associating progress with all manner of evil. Beck and the Stagnaticans apply an originalist’s view to everything form politics to religion. They insist that society govern itself by the standards and insights of our ancestors. Any advances we might have made culturally or scientifically must be abandoned and we must revert to the practices employed hundreds of years ago. We must behave as if time stopped in the distant past. We must forget what we know now.

Stagnatism was on full display at CPAC this weekend. We can only hope that this regressive theory doesn’t take hold. The last thing America needs is a prevailing philosophy that holds that going backwards is the best way forward.

CPAC In The House And The Party Don’t Stop

Posted by Mark NC on February 20, 2010 at 11:25 am. NO Comments :

This is a followup to my column on CPAC’s efforts to make their conference and the conservative movement more appealing to young people. The key component of their strategy was the XPAC lounge, a slammin crib stocked with video games and junk food where Yaffie playas can chill. The “X” is for “Xtreme”. But then there was also this: From the CPAC schedule of events…

11:00
XPAC Rap/Jam Session
Washington Rooms 1-4
Sponsored by Parcbench.com
Live music and special performances by Rappers: Hi-Caliber, Young Cons, and many more!
Open to all XPAC ticket holders

Well…Talking Points Memo attended this highly anticipated throwdown and came away with some compelling video of hip, young, right-wing activists.

Liberals are in BIG trouble now. So throw your tea bags in the air. And wave em like you’re on Medicare. You been served a steaming brew of FAIL.

Live From CPAC: Glenn Beck Via Fox News

Posted by Mark NC on February 20, 2010 at 12:35 am. 3 Comments :

Fox News has notably declined to present important live events that feature President Obama or other Democrats. They even cut away from a live Republican gathering when Obama appeared to be getting the better of his GOP hosts. But Fox happily broadcast the entirety of their own Sarah Palin’s address from the Tea Crusaders convention in Nashville.

On the surface this seems to be more of the blatant partisanship that you expect of Fox News. But there may be something more nuanced in the bias of Fox’s programming.

For two days now Fox has resisted cutting to live speeches by celebrity conservatives at CPAC like Dick Cheney, Scott Brown, and Michelle Bachman. To be sure there were plenty of remotes with Carl Cameron from the conference, but nothing like the hour devoted to Palin two weeks ago.

Until tomorrow. According to a tweet from Glenn Beck, his closing night keynote will be aired live on Fox News:

“Been working this morning on cpac keynote. Still haven’t decided which message to bring. I guess we’ll find out together tomorrow. Live fnc”

If that’s accurate, then Beck will be the only speaker from CPAC to be broadcast live. They missed prospective presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty. They missed congressional leaders John Boehner and Jim DeMint. But they’re covering Beck. Just like they covered Palin. The connection? They are both Fox News employees. So maybe Fox is just expressing their bias for self-promotion.

Update: Fox News has confirmed that they will broadcast Beck’s CPAC speech live. They are also airing Newt Gingrich’s speech live – for fairness and balance.

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