CPAC 2011 may be smaller this year....

…..as the word continues to spread about their troubles and their mission.

Update: More on CPAC and Islam here at Big Peace today.

CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) run by the American Conservative Union* (David Keene and Grover Norquist primarily) may be running out of steam.  Reports are coming in from various fronts that the annual gathering of conservatives may be so narrowly defining its mission that it is losing some longtime support.  According to Richard Falknor, writing at Blue Ridge Forum, even the Heritage Foundation has drifted away.  Please read that post at BRF!

Like most Tea Party people I hadn’t attended a CPAC meeting in the past except for the one in 2009 and I really didn’t attend CPAC but I attended the Geert Wilders (Dutch Parlimentarian under fire in the Netherlands over free speech and his criticism of Muslim immigration to Europe) speech that was held in the same hotel at the same time because CPAC would not touch the Muslim/jihad/terrorism issue with a ten foot pole (last year CPAC did give a nod to that national security question).   A strong supporter of the work of Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch), I got a negative impression of CPAC for their shabby treatment of Geller and Spencer at that time.

I was further turned off by what I consider to be the Washington faux conservative establishment when I learned more about Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform).   The Glenn Beck blackboard incident kind of sealed the deal for me.  Norquist is an out of the closet open borders advocate (Americans for Tax Reform supported the McCain/Kennedy/Bush amnesty bill of 2007) and supports the Ground Zero mosque as well.

If you haven’t noticed it yet, the split in the conservative movement breaks down this way: there are those who are fiscal conservatives only and believe the grassroots should be narrowly focused on tax/spending and regulatory control issues.  And then there are those who are conservatives who support socially conservative values (traditional marriage, right to life, immigration control, etc.), and are concerned about national security along with their fiscal conservatism.

The battle lines are forming to capture you and your energy and grassroots tea partiers will soon need to decide on which side of the movement you fall, maybe you have made that choice already—I know I have, it was a no-brainer.   It’s an all or nothing package for me.  And besides, some of those groups pushing the fiscal issues only mantra, I fear, are receiving bushels of funding from big guns in big business something that I don’t want any part of.  I’m not anti-big business, I just don’t want to see grassroots tea partiers used as cannon fodder for them.

* When you visit CPAC’s web page, note that the photos at the top of the page of conservative luminaries does not represent in every case those who have confirmed they will speak this year.

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