As you probably know, the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference will take place early next month just outside of Washington. The typical conservative thinks of CPAC as the major annual gathering of the activist right. On the other hand, Daily Kos featured writer Hunter views it as "a collection of people who have a pathologic inability to feel shame" over their copious political misjudgments and screw-ups.
Hunter, who covered the 2013 CPAC for DKos, mused this past Wednesday night that the conference...
is intended as [a] monument to...failures [such as last fall's government shutdown]. Destroy a budget surplus For Conservatism, and you're a hero. Be passionately and conspicuously wrong about something—foreign policy, economic policy, science, the outcome of passing your new law allowing private employees to be used as sausage filling, you name it—and your ideologically rigid incompetence is the ticket to your fame. There's a reason that the Sarah Palins and the Donald Trumps are popular movement figures; they are perceived as being disliked by liberals, and that is full and sufficient reason to declare that they must be clever folks. Insufficiently partisan New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie could not get himself invited to the big show—until an investigation was launched into whether his office improperly used the machinery of government to punish his perceived enemies, non-conservative enemies, Democratic enemies. Now he'll get a standing ovation.
No, I do not think that CPAC, or their very peculiar brand of Orwellian conservatism, is in any danger of obsolescence anytime soon. Being snidely oblivious, stubbornly contrarian and very proudly wrong is very much the point; the very premise of the conference is to get like-minded people in a room and all be stubbornly, obliviously wrong about things together, without any pesky interference from news broadcasts or budget sheets or history books or those damn irritating non-conservatives bringing up things, a place where a Rand Paul can be a hero for sticking it to the man, whoever the man is during any given week, but where a Mitt Romney is an embarrassment because he did not believe enough, or was not beholden to the ideology enough. He was not wrong in the right ways, you see, in the ways that appear on the pamphlets and handouts each and every year...
