More CPAC Fun

Keeping up with CPAC is like trying to watch all the Winter Olympics coverage. You do the best you can and then try to catch up.


David Corn says the GOP "Dewey Beats Truman" euphoria may be sidetracked by their embracing of the crazy:


The R's are steering hard into bizarro land. A few weeks ago, GOP Chairman Michael Steele told an audience that "after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money." Within nanoseconds, the Democratic Party had an ad ready. As Inoted last week, prominent GOPers are brazenly lying about the stimulus, claiming it has produced no new jobs. It's almost as if they are publicly rooting for no job creation. (At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, presidential contender Mitt Romney joined this parade.) That false spin about the stimulus may sync up with the beliefs of many Americans who are highly skeptical of the recovery package, probably assuming it's somehow connected to TARP and other bailouts. But the remarks of these GOPers show they're not living in the real world -- as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has pointed out. This weekend he chided Republicans who are trash-talking the stimulus, saying that it created 150,000 new jobs in California alone. "It's kind of politics," Schwarzenegger said.

Meanwhile, at CPAC, which was co-sponsored this year by the John Birch Society, right-wing wackiness was on full display. While decrying President Obama's agenda as "socialism," Rep. Steve King, an Iowa GOPer, declared that the right's political opponents are "Trotskyites, Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists, Marxists." Yeah, that's a good way of describing Rahm Emanuel, ex-investment banker. (Reality check: King sits on the House Agriculture Committee, and his congressional district is one of the top recipients in the country of federal farm subsidies. So who's a redistributionist?)

Romney insisted that Obama was responsible for the 10 percent unemployment rate. Don't they teach them at Harvard Business School how to read a spreadsheet? Six million of the 8 million jobs lost in the past year or so vanished prior to the passage of Obama's stimulus package. (Romney also served up a big dose of I-love-Dubya. Good luck selling George W. Bush nostalgia to the American public.) And Liz Cheney, the daughter of ex-veep Dick Cheney, told the crowd, " They will try to silence us." What they was out to get Liz Cheney? She didn't specify. But this was an odd spurt of paranoia -- especially since Cheney, a regular on "Meet the Press," was saying this on live television, courtesy of C-SPAN. She and her dad seem to have no problem breaking any silence.





Manwhile, Mike Huckabee- who fared very poorly in the CPAC presidential preference poll, says CPAC is too libertarian and therefore doesn't count any more. He skipped it, choosing instead to quizz First Lady Michelle Obama on whether her anti-fat campaign will create another government bureaucracy.


Presumably, the Huckster's free-market, private sector alternative is buying his weight loss book.



Stripes are just so wrong