Live from behind the oil curtain

I can't believe I just gave that name to a post. Anyway, the Conservative Political Action Conference took place in Washington this week. Al Franken broadcast his show from the proceedings on Thursday and Friday (where we were treated to such gems as the head of the right-wing group "Accuracy in Media" defending Gannon/Guckert because he was unfairly targeted for his sexuality-- by a gay man!)

Salon has a nice roundup of the proceedings, where the Maoistically inclined were informed by a US Congressman that... well, just read on:

Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

But it isn't all beer and skittles:

In January, Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury during the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page, published a damning column in the progressive Z Magazine about fascist tendencies in the conservative movement. "In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush," he wrote. "Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush … Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy."

An absolute must-read.