This is perhaps neither here nor there, but Congress.org notes:
In 2010, tea partyers used [CPAC] as a platform to launch their fiscally minded Contract From America. Colonial outfits and "Don't Tread on Me" flags announced their presence.
This time around, tea partyers were less visible at the 11,000-person event. The conservative lollapalooza, which draws young conservative leaders from across the nation, was a mishmash of groups instead, some with conflicting ideals.
The principal conflict, as best I could tell, as uttered by one young activist: "Going to protests and trying to get on the news, that's not really for me."
Whether that attitude merely denotes a sudden, pseudoconservative unfashionability in dressing up like an inmate of Bedlam and more so acting like one, only mimes will tell.
Or maybe CPAC poobahs simply instructed a decided toning down of the tricorn-hat thing, for fear of their movement looking as imbecilic as it sounds. Or, the nasty hissing one hears from the tea party is only its leaking air.
What is clear is that those still in the movement, whatever their numbers, are as magnificently delusional as ever. For diagnostic confirmation, check out this mass email -- subject line: "The Secret Obama Doesn't Want You to Know About" -- from Tea Party Express's 'Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama':
You've probably seen the news reports about how Barack Obama is trying to 'moderate' his image - even comparing himself to Ronald Reagan. The reason he has been forced to do this is that after the recent election results, Obama and his advisers realized the power of the tea party movement, and that they (the Obama administration) were in serious danger of losing their re-election campaign. That's why Obama's advisers have already been leaving the White House to start up his re-election campaign.
"The rooster's crowing and the sun's rising" was actually the ideal subject line for such gibberish, but I suppose they wouldn't have appreciated the exactitude.
And then there's this, from impeachment-impressario turned coffee-salesman Joe Scarbourough, writing in Politico:
[CPAC] raised more questions for the party than it answered.... [T]he conservative movement still has no idea who will lead it through the next election....
[T]he biggest reason prospective candidates are so reluctant to declare their candidacy in 2011 is simple: Most of them privately believe Obama will end up winning in 2012.
Check that: All of them privately believe that. Otherwise those who don't would presently be more visible in organizing the vastly incoherent rubble that is the modern conservative movement.
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