WAKE THE FUCK UP AMERICA!

It's easy to miss the threat of someone who's misinformed, paranoid and more than a little crazy. But when that someone has oodles and oodles of dollars, organizing prowess, and private ownership of a significant book-publishing company and a television network, you'd better watch out.



The fodder for ridicule provided by the weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference gave progressive journalists, including me, the opportunity to have lots of gleeful word fun examining the internecine battles over gay rights and torture, Ron Paul's victory in the presidential straw poll, Ann Coulter's tired act. Glenn Beck's medicine show -- and a host of other madness.
But ridicule is not activism. It makes us feel better, assuring us of our superiority while the other side gathers steam for the fight ahead.
I do not mean to dismiss the work of the many tireless progressive activists engaged in keeping health-care reform alive, keeping progressive media vibrant, bringing feminism to a new generation, or fighting labor's good fight. Nor do I mean to dis the funders and major donors of progressive causes. But unless progressive leaders truly reassess, at an operational and structural level, the organization of the right, I will remain doubtful of our ability to compete at the moment when the right has found a cause around which to unite: hatred of all things Obama.
It wasn't the predictable program at CPAC that brought me to this point: not the panel on the ostensible global warming hoax or the one on "Saving Freedom From the Tax Collectors," or the speeches by U.S. senators calling the president a tyrant and a socialist. I've been covering the right a long time; I'm used to that kind of thing.
No, it was my tour through a seemingly endless exhibit hall that rang my alarm bell -- table after table piled with glossy, slickly produced literature, trinkets and treats. The whiff of underfunding that so often pervades the exhibit halls of progressive confabs was hard to locate here.
I got a bright yellow bag, gratis, emblazoned with the letters 'NRA". Newsmax gave me a deck of Ronald Reagan playing cards (a different Reagan quote on each card).
The Claire Boothe Luce Policy Institute supplied me with a nicely produced date book featuring photographs of the right's leading ladies: Phyllis Schlafly, Bay Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, all shot specifically for that calendar in a kind of uniform of white shirt and jeans (except for Phyllis, who wore a skirt).
From Let Freedom Ring, I picked up a high-quality black bumper sticker with the word "ARROGANT" printed in white, except for the "O", which was replaced by the logo of the Obama for President campaign.
It's not the goodies on offer in the hall that are the right's treasure, but rather the financial backing the easy dispensing of tchotchkes and nachas represents.
Also prominent in the hall were a number of for-profit companies there seeking new business from conservative groups, whether for Web site design and hosting, campaign organizing or data mining.
Near the front of the hall was Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Regnery Publishing and Human Events magazine. Regnery's authors include Michelle Malkin, Newt Gingrich, Laura Ingraham, and a host of right-wing notables. They have a knack for creating bestsellers, which is not as hard as it looks when you've got a hall that big full of groups willing to buy these books in bulk to give away as premiums for membership and or other purposes.