this is good

it's funny BUT it's scary too
A Liberal Goes Undercover to Brave America's Premiere Right-Wing Gathering
By Mister Leonard Pierce, AlterNet
So I decided to go to the 2008 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC -- America's foremost gathering of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. Why did I do it? For years, I'd been writing snotty articles about the reactionary right as a contributor to the blog Sadly, No! but aside from family reunions, I never spent much time with them. So, with a hotly contested presidential election in the offing and rumors of the retreat of modern neoconservativism being whispered in the corridors of punditry, I decided there was no better time than the present to worm my way into the midst of the right wing's true believers. Using the generous donations of Sadly, No! readers and other well-wishers, and posing as a lobbyist for the American Milk Solids Council, I made my way to Washington in early February and sat through every moment of CPAC 2008. Herewith, a highly abridged version of my copious notes from the belly of the beast.
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WEDNESDAY NIGHT. When I arrive at the hotel, two members of the Young America's Foundation -- the omnipresent youth league that superceded the hippie-punching Young Americans for Freedom -- are trying to check in using a credit card not belonging to them. Rules are for poor people, and they seem to think that if they berate the poor West African guy working the front desk, they'll get what they want eventually. They may be wrong, but damn it, no late-shift immigrant is going to tell them that. Modern Washington, the Washington of Bush and CPAC, was built to keep people like him from telling people like them what to do.
The convention will be attended, largely, by two groups of people: the mainline Republican rump of 19-percenters, who think George W. Bush is doing a Brownian heck of a job, and the radical right, who think that the problem with George is that he's not heartlessly conservative enough. To put it another way, here we have the people who look at the wreckage of the American 2000s and pronounce it a wonderful thing and the people who look at it and say, "Yeah, it's pretty awful, but if we tried, we could make it a whole lot worse."..............