Just when you thought right-wingers couldn't get any worse, the Conservative Political Action Conference came to town.
Some of what went on was the same kind of silliness partisans of all stripes engage in, such as the doormats with photos of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews captioned "Stomp Out Liberal Media." Rachel Maddow was bemusedly irked that they hadn't made one of her.
And some of it was so grotesquely outlandish you had trouble keeping your meal down. As with Dick Armey's claim that there is no "crisis in health care." And the standing ovation for the self-confessed war criminal Dick Cheney who told the crowd he wasn't going to run for the Presidency in 2012. An announcement that Richard Adams lamented would deprive us of a primary pitting Cheney against Palin in a real-life version of Alien vs. Predator.
And then there was the truly vile. In this case, there was Jason Mattera talking about recruiting young people into the conservative movement with a comment about the CPAC gathering that he likened to "our Woodstock":
"Except that unlike the last gathering, our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences and our notion of freedom doesn’t consist of snorting cocaine," he said, "which is certainly one thing that separates us from Barack Obama."
Later came the coke-snorting Baldwin brother, the youngest of the clan, Stephen, who was on hand to recruit "Next Gen" conservatives by means of a snazzy social/entertainment lounge. He had this to say to ABC:
"I am not happy about the way things are. I pray for President Obama every single day. But tell you what. Homey made this bed, now he has got to lay in it."
Just kidding, right, Stephen?