Speakers ranged from Rep. Michelle Bachmann to Texas Governor Rick Perry and potential 2012 Republican Presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney.
Each speaker tossed the red meat to their base of teapartiers and crimson red supporters. Some spoke on how poorly Obama is doing and how they all have a plan to move our Country forward. The official agenda of CPAC ranged from:
1.Using School Choice and Homeschools to Grow the Conservative Movement,
2.Getting Started In Hollywood,
3.Traditional Marriage and Society
4.The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary.
I realize that these items on the official agenda are good topics of conversation and points of interest for the right wing conservatives.
Of all the great conservative topics on this agenda though, I realized the one thing the CPAC organizers left out, JOBS.
JOBS is the #1 issue on the minds of the American people by 43% , followed by healthcare at 18% and the federal budget at 14% according to CBS news/New York Times poll.
Yet the organizers of this national convergence of conservatives didn't think it was important enough to set aside time on the agenda for it. They did however set aside time for, "Are We Superman? Using School Choice and Homeschools to Grow the Conservative Movement"
Interestingly, I had the opportunity to speak with Tommy Thompson, the former Health and Human Services Secretary under President George W. Bush today on a local conservative talk radio show. I confronted him with this very issue.
I asked Mr. Thompson why didn't the organizers of CPAC put the ECONOMY and job creation on the official agenda, yet traditional marriage got special treatment.
He replied with the typical republican mantra of, "the government doesn't create jobs." I then followed up with, "well that explains why the republicans in the House of Representatives have not introduced a bill regarding their plan to get the economy moving forward."
It has been over thirty days since the GOP took control of the House and they have managed to bring to the floor multiple bills, including re-defining what rape is, to repealing health insurance reform.
Not one has been a plan regarding job creation. Our Country is still in the midst of high unemployment, and the only issue that the organizers of the national conservative movement didn't set aside to have a meeting about, was the economy. It's going to be a long two years with these people in control.
Voters' remorse yet?
mark-bail says
Much the way they’ve turned the term “liberal” into a negative epithet, they’ve hijacked the word “conservative.” These people are ideological wingnuts.
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p>In terms of their values, CPAC doesn’t give a crap about people. They have a vision of society that they would have people conform to or be damned. Actual people are low on their list. Their point of view, though not their ideology, has more in common with that of Marxist-Leninists than American Democrats.
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p>I won’t lump the whole GOP in with these folks–but I’m biting my tongue.
lasthorseman says
The CT community now has growing numbers of places which discuss the dying institutions of America and the falsehoods of conventional left vs right politics.
http://www.infowars.com/global…
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p>Even high school kids are “doing it”.
http://my.hsj.org/Schools/News…
jimc says
My biggest beef with CPAC is the amount of coverage it gets in the press. It’s really not important any more. Maybe it was when they were nascent, but now they’re everywhere. They achieved their mission of making sure “conservative” is not a dirty word (believe it or not, it once was).
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p>Now it’s our turn.
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p>
mark-bail says
“Boom, Boom, Ain’t it great to be crazy” and hear it played in the Top 40.
kbusch says
The American Conservative view is that taxes and regulation strangle job creation. So creating jobs isn’t a matter of doing so much as undoing. It’s pretty simple.
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p>There’s also a strong belief in the power of the free market to right itself. And so, again by that view, stimulative spending or mucking with the money supply are more likely to harm the economy than help it.
Of course, these views are subject to empirical verification. If you recall, the first Bush Administration lost jobs on net, but that didn’t stop the conservatives in charge from making outlandishly rosy predictions about how the Bush tax cuts were going to create bizillions of jobs. Yes, we had a recovery but it was consistently much slower than the ideologues predicted. Tax cuts were just not as effective as advertised.
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p>Across the pond, we already have the experiment of the freshly minted Tory government in the U.K. imposing austerity of just the sort that Boehner and McConnell think we could use more of. Were austerity such good medicine, why economic haven’t indicators in the U.K. have not reflected it?
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p>Of course, one wonders only about such stuff if one cares about reality.