Author: David Weigel

Glenn Beck closed the 37th annual CPAC with a passionate, personal, ideological-but-not-partisan speech about his career and America’s values. For 45 minutes he held the crowd in the palm of his hand, veering between tales of his small-town upbringing and denunciations of the progressive movement.

“Progressivism is a cancer in America,” said Beck, “and it’s eating our Constitution — and it was meant to eat our Constitution.”

For fans of Beck’s daily TV show (less so his radio show) it was a deja vu kind of spectacle. Throughout the day, rumors had circulated through the Marriott about a “special guest” who might introduce Beck. Maybe it would be Sarah Palin; maybe it would be George W. Bush. I talked to activists who worked their sources with both of those people, coming up dry. A few minutes into Beck’s speech, the “special guest” was revealed — the chalkboard Beck uses on TV. The crowd broke into cheers as loud as anything heard all weekend.

“It’s still morning in America,’ said Beck. “It happens to be a kind of a head-pounding, vomiting, hangover kind of morning in America.”

It was a largely optimistic speech, less doom-and-gloom, and less specific in its attacks on the Obama administration than Beck’s usual fare. And coming so soon after the loud boos that greeted Ron Paul’s CPAC straw poll win, the rapturous response was sort of ironic. Nothing Beck said would have sounded strange coming from Paul — a fact that became even clearer when Beck said America “does not have to spread democracy” at gunpoint, because its values will spread themselves.

Beck scored few hits on President Obama, even apologizing (tongue planted in cheek) for a joke about the president’s Nobel prize. His targets were broader — the Democratic Party, the GOP, and anyone else touched by progressive ideas.

“My name is the Republican Party and I have a problem!” said Beck, suggesting a confession for the GOP that multiple CPAC speakers — including some party politicians — had issued over the weekend. “I’m addicted to spending and big government.”

Beck compared the party to Tiger Woods, too, paraphrasing the golf star’s mea culpa. “I knew my actions were wrong, but I thought normal rules did not apply. Kind of like economic rules.” And he made a thinly-disguised attack on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “We have a guy in the Republican Party who says his favorite president is Theodore Roosevelt. Well, I thought so too, before I read Theodore Roosevelt.”

The only Republican who came in for praise was the former vice president. “I love Dick Cheney,” said Beck. “But it’s not enough just to not suck as much as the other side.”

Echoing another theme of the conference — really, of every CPAC — Beck dismissed the idea that Republicans needed to reach out by becoming less conservative. “We need a big tent,” he said sarcastically. “What is this, a circus? America is not a clown show! America is an idea that sets people free!”

When Beck talked about facts and history, he dealt with the origins of the progressive movement up through 1938. The crowd devoured it. Woodrow Wilson’s name drew loud and knowing boos; Calvin Coolidge’s name got boisterous cheers. After praising Coolidge, Beck sniped at the press (waving his hand towards the media booth) and mimed typing on a keyboard, guessing that we’d mock him for praising the “roaring twenties.” But Beck’s attacks on Wilson were more jarring — he went after the 28th president for proposing the League of Nations and compared his fateful whistlestop tour promoting it to Obama’s campaign for health care reform.

At other times, Beck trod more familiar ground. He got his first standing ovation for saying the free enterprise system let him work from being “in the fetal position” at a low point in his career to rebuilding so “I can stand here today.” His other big applause lines, though, came after he recited patriotic boilerplate, culminating with a reading of “the New Colossus,” the Emma Lazerus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

Beck’s speech achieved a major goal — it perfectly captured the change underway in the conservative movement, the motivating worry about economic collapse and the grand appeals to history and Republican Party reform. When Beck wrapped, ACU’s David Keene walked onstage and wrote “CPAC 2010″ on the Beck chalkboard. The board, he said, would be taken to the weekly Wednesday meeting of conservatives “to remind us all of what we should be doing.”

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) scored a victory in the annual CPAC straw poll, besting nine other Republicans in a vote taken by around 2,395 attendees — around 25 percent of the people at this conservative conference. Paul won 31 percent of the vote; Mitt Romney came in second with 22 percent, his first silver medal after winning the last three straw polls. Sarah Palin came in third with 7 percent, and Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) came in fourth with 6 percent.

When GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio announced the results, loud booing broke out in the main ballroom; only when Mitt Romney’s showing was announced did they start to cheer, and the cheers continued for Sarah Palin. William Temple, the omnipresent revolutionary war re-enactor who has spent much of the conference standing in the ballroom waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsen flag, stayed mum, then cheered and waved his sign for Palin.

Still, the surprisingly strong result for Paul makes sense to those of us in the hall. Paul’s Campaign for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty were a massive presence at this year’s CPAC, holding court in a wing of the exhibit hall and hosting overflowing satellite events with guests like paleoconservative author. They registered hundreds of attendees — nametags were stashed on Campaign for Liberty’s exhibit table — and worked the vote hard as other campaigns basically ignored the contest.

The result reflects two developments at this year’s conference. The first: the mainstreaming (inside the GOP coalition) of Paul’s libertarian beliefs, after years of him being marginalized, and sometimes booed, by this crowd. CPAC teemed with young libertarian-minded activists who, a few years ago, had little to do with the official conservative movement. The second development: the real affection for Romney, who has evolved from an excitable candidate over-eager to please to something of a statesman.

Only four of the 1o nominees spoke at CPAC — Sarah Palin, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee and John Thune all skipped.

Max Blumenthal’s appearance at CPAC ended, apparently, with a confrontation between him and Andrew Breitbart. The subject of the argument: the Salon.com story that I’ve written about here in which Blumenthal claimed, incorrectly, that O’Keefe had helped organize a “racist conference” in 2006 — in reality, O’Keefe was one of several Leadership Institute employees who appeared at a debate on “race and conservatism” featuring white nationalist Jared Taylor and black conservative Kevin Martin.

I didn’t see that confrontation, but when I got to the hotel lobby, Breitbart was doing media interviews that were interrupted by Daryle Jenkins, whose One People’s Project had been the source for Blumenthal’s story. Jenkins repeated his accusations — Breitbart fired back, ending the conversation when a flustered Jenkins called him a racist.

“You fell flat on your face,” said Breitbart. “And you were busted.”

I caught Jenkins on the phone after he left the hotel. Like I’ve said, One People’s Project was wrong on the key detail of the story — O’Keefe didn’t organize the event — but Jenkins was unapologetic. He told TWI that he’d intended to cover the biannual American Renaissance conference organized by Taylor, but it was shut down. So Jenkins and the One People’s Project headed to CPAC for the express purpose of confronting Breitbart.

“I did what I had to do, more or less,” said Jenkins. “I didn’t like him trying to impugn my integrity and Max’s integrity.”

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich — who bounded onto the CPAC stage to the strains of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” — predicted that the GOP will seize control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections. That was the headline-grabbing bit of his bombastic, 30-minute speech, which touched on topics as varied as the works of Albert Camus, old anti-Soviet slogans, Gordon Wood’s definition of “corruption,” and Minnesota’s ability to balance the budget.

“Please note,” tweeted Tim Cameron of Gingrich’s group American Solutions. “Newt Gingrich doesn’t need a teleprompter.”

Other speeches by the politicians on CPAC’s presidential straw poll* were far more obviously partisan. Gingrich did have booster-ish zingers, crediting Obama with creating the jobs of Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.), Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-Va.), and Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and crediting Mitt Romney with creating more jobs than the Democrats. The first statement was cant — the second was a cutting remark that underscored why, exactly, a man who left the speaker’s chair in disgrace 12 years ago could speak so confidently about how his party was ready to govern again. He framed his prescription for Republicans — “bipartisanship” that demanded parity, right now with the majority party — as a good faith effort to save Democrats from themselves.

“We can’t go on recess,” he said.

The Democratic Party that Gingrich saw in Washington resembled the one that Glenn Beck rails against on his Fox News show — a “radical” and “corrupt” project antithetical to America’s institutions and history. Multiple speakers have compared the administration to the Soviet Union; Gingrich did so more subtly, explaining that the Soviets tried to convince their subjects that “2+2=5,” and so did the Democrats.

Before the speech, I asked a few attendees what they thought of Gingrich. Did they forgive him for endorsing Dede Scozzafava in NY-23? Sure, said University of Alabama student Alexandra Brown — “He’s Newt Gingrich.” But Ohio activist Marie Heinig told me she’d ruled out Gingrich as a conservative leader because of the “immorality” with which he conducted his personal life.

*with the exception of the one by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.)

On the way in to Newt Gingrich’s speech I spotted a crowd of the size that usually clouds around a 2012 presidential hopeful. It was Max Blumenthal, who was trying to conduct a Q&A with Hannah Giles and had drawn in dozens of onlooker with video cameras and tape recorders. A combative CPAC attendee named Jeff Cappella, a graduate student who’d spent 14 years in intelligence (I happened to have been buttonholed by him yesterday, when he gave me a Socratic grilling on torture) was firing shots at Blumenthal.

“You’re using guilt by association,” said Cappella, knocking Blumenthal for having reported on James O’Keefe’s attendance at a 2006 forum on race and conservatism. “You’re here now — are you a conservative?” He pointed to his own “Draft Cheney” sticker. “Do you support Dick Cheney for president because you’re here?”

(Photo by David Weigel)

“I support Dick Cheney for the Republican nomination,” said Blumenthal.

“For president of the United States?”

It got more combative — Cappella mocked Blumenthal for turning his head away (”You can crack your neck all you want, but I’ve got you on the ropes.”) while Blumenthal mocked Cappella’s pretentiousness (”You like the word ‘rubric,’ don’t you?”). Cappella stumbled when he asked why Blumenthal didn’t worry about President Obama having a “Hamas member in his cabinet” — when he couldn’t back it up, the liberal reporter finally succeeded in getting back to Giles, offering to give her and James O’Keefe signed copies of his book if they grabbed a drink.

“I turn 21 in June,” she averred. “I could have a lemonade!”

How manic was this? As I tried to walk on, a reporter for the CBC shoved a microphone in my face and asked what we were watching. “What is this? What is happening?” he said. I pointed him to Cappella, who seemed confused that the media wanted to cover his sparring match. In the background, Blumenthal tried to move on, followed by more cameras. When you remember that Blumenthal started getting real attention for his exposes when he filmed a combative “unauthorized documentary” at CPAC 2007, this role reversal — with giddy, camera-toting conservatives trying to cut him down to size — was incredibly ironic.

Ann Coulter’s speeches at CPAC are simultaneously the least surprising and the most headline-ready parts of the conference. Every year, the lines to get into the ballroom start more than an hour before the speech; every year she dishes out six or seven one-liners that horrify liberals. Ted Kennedy was “spilling drinks in his grave,” and Keith Olbermann was a “girl,” and Obama was the “least dangerous person named Hussein.” You’ll see the video on blogs — all of it got huge cheers. The biggest cheers? When a fan gushingly asked whether Coulter had “ever dated a liberal.”

“They weren’t liberal for long,” she said.

The closest thing to dissent came when one fan whined about the presence of anti-war libertarians at the conference.

“We learned that soy beans were the answer to Afghanistan,” he said.

“I think bombs are the answer,” said Coulter.

The libertarian presence in the room was fairly small — Sam Swedberg, the Campaign for Liberty volunteer who played sumo Janet Napolitano on Thursday, told me that if Coulter fans, not Ron Paul fans, had been in the room yesterday, there wouldn’t have been such lusty booing of anti-gay activist Ryan Sorba. But Coulter indulged the few libertarians who chanted “End the Fed.”

“I’m just curious about this movement over there for ending the Fed,” she said. “Yes, end the Fed.” Later: “If Ron Paul is behind it and it has nothing to do with foreign policy, I’m for it.”

In a short conversation after his speech — which was taped by a film crew that was hovering around us — Andrew Breitbart chided me for asking Giles about the “no outrageous costumes” attack, saying that it was a “distraction” thrown up by the Center for American Progress and Media Matters and pointing out that when blogger Mike Stark first asked O’Keefe about the costumes, he happily explained that the pimp costume wasn’t worn inside of ACORN’s offices. If George Soros, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, and Eric Boehlert of Media Matters wanted to watch the unedited tapes, said Breitbart, he was ready. He’d be challenging them to do so for months.

“This is a concerted effort, politics of personal destruction,” said Breitbart. He leaned down toward my notebook as I wrote down quotes. “Fuck you, John Podesta. What’s in your closet, John Podesta? Big Podesta? Big Soros? Do you want us to play these games? Because we’re playing to win.”

That headline might not sound like news, but the war between Media Matters and Andrew Breitbart has new developments every week. The liberal news watchdog group has been demanding retractions from anyone who reported that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles wore outlandish outfits inside of ACORN offices. They dressed more demurely during the sting than in b-roll and publicity shots which, Giles told me, were meant to illustrate how the government was whoring out the American people. After Giles introduced Breitbart (”my boss”), the founder of Big Government, he aimed and fired at the people who’d been trying to knock down his story with that argument.

“I have to apologize to the nation because the pimp in the pimp and prostitute video apparently wasn’t dressed like a flamboyant pimp,” said Breitbart, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m so sorry to this nation. I don’t know what to say.” He pivoted to an attack on the people criticizing his reporters. “Bring it on! Mr. Podesta, we’re watching you! Mr. Podesta we are so sick of your Alinsky tactics and politics of personal destruction.”

A self-identified “army wife” asked former senator Rick Santorum an open-ended question about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — she wanted reform, but was full repeal really the best option? In pretty careful language, Santorum contrasted America’s policy on gays in the military with Israel’s — everyone served in the military in Israel, but Americans could choose whether to volunteer or not. The implication was that gays could just say no.

“Some people say: Whatever the generals say,” said Santorum. “I’m not so sure that we have now so indoctrinated the officer corps in this country that they can’t see straight to make the right decision.”

Nobody wants the first Saturday morning speaking spot — the faces of the people who drag themselves into the CPAC ballroom bear the evidence of Friday night’s happy hours and parties. But former senator Rick Santorum did his best with it, alternating an apology for the Bush years (”we failed”), for TARP, and for his 2004 endorsement in the Pennsylvania Republican primary for U.S. Senate.

“Against the advice of my wife,” said Santorum, “I endorsed Arlen Specter.”

A lusty boo went up from the floor. “My sentiments exactly!” said Santorum. “How many times have I said this in my 20-plus years of marriage? I should have listened to my wife.” He would overcome his mistake, he said, by working “day and night” to elect Pat Toomey to the Senate in 2010.

Santorum sounded more comfortable going after the Obama administration on national security, accusing it — as he does on Fox News on a pretty regular basis — of ignoring the “Islamist” threat. Just look at its latest QDR, its report on national security.

“In that 128-page report,” said Santorum, “not one mention of the word ‘Islam or Muslim.’ But eight pages to global warming as a threat to national security! Do you feel safer?”

In the Q&A, a fan asked Santorum why he wasn’t running against Specter himself. “Because Pat Toomey’s earned it,” said Santorum.

The ballroom was packed for Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-Texas) CPAC speech — the doors were shut for a good 30 minutes before the speech began. And to the strains of “We Will Rock You,” Paul took the stage and happily took credit for being right about the economic collapse before anyone else.

“That big crash, it came,” said Paul! “And all of a sudden, I was on Fox News 60 times!”

Curiously, Paul spent very little of his speech taking victory laps and much of it on an extended meditation about civil liberties and preemptive war. A crowd that had heard a lot of anti-liberal history lessons — and paid attention — was treated to a lecture about the Red Scare and George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign.

It’s been almost exactly 18 months since Philip J. Berg, a Pennsylvania lawyer and Hillary Clinton supporter, filed a lawsuit demanding that his state keep Barack Obama off the presidential ballot until he provided satisfactory proof that he was born in America — something Berg said Obama couldn’t do. Today Berg appeared at CPAC, handing out a leaflet promoting his ObamaCrimes website (it argues that the president is a “citizen of Indonesia”) and seeking out reporters to promote his case.

I stumbled upon Berg as a Belgian TV station gave him a pretty polite and short interview — anyone’s guess whether they were genuinely curious or whether they were humoring him so they could move on. But as he spoke, Berg drew some more onlookers, including another reporter who taped the interview and gushed about what a fan he was of Berg’s work.

“These are people who really support this particular issue,” said Berg of the CPAC crowd. “This issue transcends party lines.”

One of the odd coincidences of CPAC is the location of the National Organization for Marriage’s booth just 20-odd feet away from the booth of GOProud, the upstart gay Republican organization. On Thursday, leaders of both groups posed for an impromptu meeting in view of CNN’s cameras, joking about the possibility of a beer summit. But on Friday morning, the National Organization for Marriage preemptively blasted GOProud in a surprisingly acid press release.

Many reporters, including Politico, have asked us how we feel about the fact GOProud is just a few booths over from us. We welcome everyone’s right to participate in the democratic process, but we have a message for GOProud on marriage: If you try to elect pro-gay-marriage Republicans, we will Dede Scozzafava them. The majority of Americans, and the vast majority of Republicans, support marriage as the union of husband and wife, and NOM is here to make sure these voters and their voices are heard loud and clear.

GOProud’s executive director Jimmy LaSalvia was furious. “When the cameras were rolling,” said LaSalvia, “they were very nice. Now that the cameras aren’t rolling, rather than walking 20 feet over to us, they fire off a news release. What kind of man can’t walk across the row to deliver a message? I just have a question for them: Who’s the pansy at CPAC? What wusses. Just come over. Don’t play nice if you’re not going to be nice.”

I told LaSalvia that in my interactions with NOM, they’ve stressed that they respect gays and gay rights. “That’s their tactic,” he said. “Bottom line, that’s what they do. They’re very nice and friendly, and they put on a pretty face, then they play in the gutter.”

I talked to Justin Haas over at the NOM booth about the CNN moment and LaSalvia’s criticism; Haas said GOProud’s embrace of gay marriage and abortion rights raised questions about the role they wanted to play in conservative politics.

“They claim they’re not funded by Tim Gill,” said Haas, referring to the gay multi-millionaire whom conservatives blame for organizing big money against pro-traditional marriage activists. “That’s why they broke away from the Log Cabin Republicans. But that doesn’t make any sense if they’re making a statement now that they’re pro-gay marriage.”

I haven’t nitpicked many comments made by CPAC speakers, but during the “Saving Freedom From Vote Fraud” panel, ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief passed on a myth that really should be debunked.

“In Massachusetts, the Scott Brown election, there was video of someone passing out blank absentee ballots on election day to people who had already voted.”

This isn’t true. On election day, one of the more than 150 conservative activists who traveled to Massachusetts to document “fraud” filmed Lawrence, Mass., community activist Isabelle Melendez showing a cameraman a facsimile of an absentee ballot as she explained how she educated her radio show listeners on how to fill them out. Facsimile ballots are about as controversial on election day as “I voted” stickers — I saw similar ballot samples posted near the entrances to polling places. ElectionJournal.com never updated its story on the video — it’s been a “developing” situation for a month.

And there you go, a fact-free story that was debunked on election day survives as a “voter fraud” horror story. Behold, the power of shaky video.

I caught up with Hannah Giles, co-star of the ACORN sting videos, after she accepted one of 10 “Buckley Awards” handed out in the XPAC lounge for young conservative leaders. Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack and FreedomWorks organizer Brendan Steinhauser were among the winners, but no one attracted as much attention as Giles, who was approached every two or three minutes by photograph-seekers.

“This was terrifying at first, being here,” said Giles, who was sporting black pumps, a black top, and a black-and-pink miniskirt as she walked through the conference halls. Was she getting used to the attention? “Nope! I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

I asked Giles about a criticism that’s often been leveled against them — that they hyped up the video by wearing outrageous clothes in promotional materials and the videos’ introductions that they didn’t wear in the actual stings.

“We never claimed that he went in with a pimp costume,” said Giles. “That was b-roll. It was purely b-roll. He was a pimp, I was a prostitute, and we were walking in front of government buildings to show how the government was whoring out the American people.”

What’s Giles working on now? “I’m working on some stories, doing research — you’ll see,” said Giles. She’ll be working with text, not video.

As the bulk of CPAC attendees filed into the Marriott Ballroom for speeches by Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.), Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), more than 400 people crowded into an adjacent room to join in the launch of the Freedom Defense Initiative: “Jihad, the Political Third Rail.” At the door, security guards checked IDs — they were trying to keep one specific, unnamed person out of the room.

“The only event on the CPAC schedule about terrorism was ‘Why real conservatives oppose the war on terror,’” said Pamela Gellar, who blogs at Atlas Shrugs and is a rock star among terrorism-focused conservatives. They’d invited a writer for the libertarian AntiWar.com to participate in that panel, said Gellar. “Why don’t they just have Cindy Sheehan?”

“She takes names,” marveled one student near the doors, right before Gellar called the Christmas Day terrorist the “balls bomber.”

“He’s got more balls than our political elites, right?” she said.

In the front of the room, images of Muslim riots played on a pull-down screen, stopping when the speaker line-up got started. In the back, signed copies of “Muslim Mafia” were on sale. The line-up of speakers included “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam” author Robert Spencer, former Pentagon analyst Steve Coughlin, and congressional candidate Lt. Col. (ret.) Allen West. And the first speaker was Wafa Sultan, a former Muslim who won fame in 2005 for her combative debates on Arab-language TV.

“It seems that Obama’s administration is not yet prepared, and neither was President Bush,” said Sultan, to call out Islam as an “aggressive and violent ideology that aspires to world domination.”

Sultan spoke slowly, apologizing for her accent — the only interrupting sounds came from the room’s air conditioner. “September 11 was a tragic moment in history,” said Sultan. “The integration of Islam in our society is a subject of equal concern. I urge each of you to fight the application of Sharia law in this country.” She closed by paraphrasing Thomas Paine. “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day so that my child can live in peace. Islam is here. Let us deal with the evil of Islam now. Right now! So our future generations can live in peace!”

Sultan wrapped up, nodded at her standing ovation, and apologized again for her accent.

“The truth is intelligible,” said Spencer, “no matter what the accent may be.”

The Friday morning session at CPAC follows a pattern — an exciting opening speech to rouse conference attendees out of bed, and a few pro forma speeches until the possible presidential candidates show up. Herman Cain, an African-American conservative radio host from Georgia, was given the fire-up duties, then Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had to bat clean-up. And Cantor’s speech received the most mild reception I’d yet seen here. He simply didn’t try to rev up the crowd: The Democrats’ problems don’t mean “Republicans have earned the trust” of voters yet; The party needs to commit to a “reform agenda.”

The only flashes of energy came from William Temple, the omnipresent Revolutionary War re-enactor, who stood at the entrance to the ballroom shouting “Huzzah!” and waving a bayonet and Gadsden flag for every statement he liked.

It was a typical Cantor performance. He didn’t spend much time on the appeal to history or one-liners about Obama. If his party prospers, Cantor will become majority leader.

Following Cantor: Mark Mix of National Right to Work, who actually said this:

“Freedom works and freedom works. At National Right to Work, we’re interested in the ‘freedom works’ part of this equation.”

J.D. Hayworth, the former congressman from Arizona who announced a primary bid against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) this month, is all over CPAC. Last night he hit the NRA’s pre-dinner reception, and spent every second pumping hands and making small talk. If people didn’t know who he was when they met him, they came away buzzing.

“He’s running against John McCain!” said one student in a pinstriped suit, reuniting with a friend after meeting Hayworth. “That’s awesome!” As they moved on, Hayworth moved on to Wayne LaPierre, president of the NRA, who said “Thank you” to Hayworth and chatted in full view of partygoers. At the dinner, Hayworth moved through the tables, talking to reporters and fans, and practically jumped out of his seat when the emcee, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), asked 2010 candidates to stand.

If any more proof was needed that CPAC organizers aren’t sweating the stories and photos about fringe conservatives making their way around the conference, behold: the John Birch Society. The notorious right-wing group signed on as a co-sponsor late last year, drawing some controversy at the time and… showing up anyway. If anything, the JBS — which has benefited immeasurably from the amazing political comeback of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a longtime supporter — is being greeted with some smiles, some eye-rolls, and some conspiratorial winks. JBS’s Chris Bentley reflects on the conference so far:

One Washington Times reporter asked to take a picture of our booth as it was still under construction. We smiled and said yes. Then staff member Sam Antonio chimed in and told her to be sure and come back tomorrow, as we would have the best looking booth here. And, he added, with a little humor, “it will be the most controversial to boot.” She smirked and responded that we already are controversial.

On Thursday as we arrived to start the day’s events, the Marriott was already teeming with thousand of visitors. We’ve had many curious attendees stop by already, even though the day is barely half over. Some visitors have been congressional candidates from across the country, others from media. Some notable personalities have included such diverse individuals as Jerome Corsi and Rachel Maddow. Ms. Maddow even gave us an informal six-minute interview/discussion.

To understand just how much of a shift this represents for the mainstream right, consider — two years ago, RedState.com blasted Ron Paul for endorsing the “conspiracy nuts” of the JBS. One year ago, National Review’s John Derbyshire implied that it was a vile smear to connect Ron Paul to the Birchers. And yet here they are at CPAC, with a book I mention in my story today:

Why is that such a surprising find at CPAC? Answer here.

On the way from the press room to a Thursday night reception I snapped the quick photo below of James O’Keefe (left), who made it to CPAC after all, and who has been tight-lipped to reporters but hardly shy about making the rounds with conservative admirers. O’Keefe’s partner in the mysterious office sting of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Joseph Basel (center) is also pictured, and as Ken Vogel reports, Stan Dai also made the rounds at CPAC-related parties. And O’Keefe’s partner in the ACORN sting, Hannah Giles — the young activist who posed as a prostitute — has also been meeting here with conservatives, spending some time on Thursday at Blogger’s Row.

But another young conservative, whose video exposes have made him a star on the right, has taken a lot more flak at CPAC than O’Keefe. Jason Mattera, the media spokesman for Young Americans for Freedom, gave a speech promoting his book “Obama Zombies” that the New York Times’s Kate Zernike pilloried for its “racial tones” and “racial stereotypes,” comparing his tone of voice to Chris Rock. Mattera, who has a thick Brooklyn accent, couldn’t believe it.

“She couldn’t take a minute to find out that I’m from Brooklyn?” Mattera told TWI. “Guess what? Chris Rock is from Brooklyn, too. It’s unbelievable. Calling somebody a ‘racist’ is the most damaging accusation you can make.” He encouraged TWI to investigate how the story was written. “If you see her, you could ask her, reporter to reporter, why didn’t she find that out?”

Here’s the video of Mattera’s speech — in which he even says he’s from Brooklyn. Judge for yourself.