A Liberal Goes Undercover to Brave America's Premiere Right-Wing Gathering

So I decided to go to the 2008 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC -- America's foremost gathering of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. Why did I do it? For years, I'd been writing snotty articles about the reactionary right as a contributor to the blog Sadly, No! but aside from family reunions, I never spent much time with them. So, with a hotly contested presidential election in the offing and rumors of the retreat of modern neoconservativism being whispered in the corridors of punditry, I decided there was no better time than the present to worm my way into the midst of the right wing's true believers. Using the generous donations of Sadly, No! readers and other well-wishers, and posing as a lobbyist for the American Milk Solids Council, I made my way to Washington in early February and sat through every moment of CPAC 2008. Herewith, a highly abridged version of my copious notes from the belly of the beast.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT. When I arrive at the hotel, two members of the Young America's Foundation -- the omnipresent youth league that superceded the hippie-punching Young Americans for Freedom -- are trying to check in using a credit card not belonging to them. Rules are for poor people, and they seem to think that if they berate the poor West African guy working the front desk, they'll get what they want eventually. They may be wrong, but damn it, no late-shift immigrant is going to tell them that. Modern Washington, the Washington of Bush and CPAC, was built to keep people like him from telling people like them what to do.

The convention will be attended, largely, by two groups of people: the mainline Republican rump of 19-percenters, who think George W. Bush is doing a Brownian heck of a job, and the radical right, who think that the problem with George is that he's not heartlessly conservative enough. To put it another way, here we have the people who look at the wreckage of the American 2000s and pronounce it a wonderful thing and the people who look at it and say, "Yeah, it's pretty awful, but if we tried, we could make it a whole lot worse."

In the elevator up to my floor, two men in golf hats (golf hats? at 8 p.m.?) talk about how high taxes will cause the rich to flee the country and stop producing if Hillary gets into office. (They're apparently laboring under the misapprehension that Americans still produce things.) This is a real threat in the world of CPAC, while things like massive healthcare shortages, an increasingly ill-educated population, dependence on dwindling natural resources and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor are the stuff of fairy tales.

I've arrived too late for the pre-CPAC Diamond Reception and too early for the expensive hookers to start roaming the halls. The soda machine costs a buck and a quarter a can, so I decide to just wait for the boy to bring my bottle of gin. Then, before the pills kick in -- I need a little help to get through this -- a moment of imperialist panic: What if there is no boy? What if there is no gin?

THURSDAY MORNING. Here's a description of Hell they never give you: a huge room full of all the people you hate most, and they're all having a wonderful time.

Yes, it's all smiles and sunshine here at CPAC: lively young ladies with skillfully applied layers of makeup are here to greet you at every turn and correct your every confusion. Hopelessly earnest collegiate nerds hand out Mitt Romney stickers and hope against hope that John McCain has some sort of campaign trail meltdown: perhaps it will occur to him that the last 30 years have all been a fever dream brought on by bad fish paste, that he is still in some VC labor camp wearing a tin can around his head, and he will savagely turn on his campaign manager with a broken bottle while at a Kiwanis breakfast.