Gene Wisdom featured in Guardian story.

Gene Wisdom

My friend Gene Wisdom, with whom I went to CPAC this year, is featured in the below article in The Guardian. This article was published March 16th, but it just now came to my attention. Gene Wisdom is a local conservative activist and heads the Conservative Fusion book club. His essay's have appeared in this blog.

CPAC 2013: An angry and beaten US right fires out scattergun wacky policies in hunt for victory

Gene Wisdom, a 55-year-old conservative from Nashville, Tennessee, was no fan of Barack Obama. Clutching a book called The Communist, he was waiting eagerly to meet the book's author, Paul Kengor, so that he could sign it. The book, which detailed the life of black American journalist and labour activist Frank Marshall Davis, bore a startling subtitle: "The untold story of Barack Obama's mentor." That worked for Wisdom. "It is very convincing," he said.

Believing that the president is more or less a communist would be surprising in many political circles, including many Republican ones. But Wisdom was not just queuing at another book launch. He was one of the crowd at the largest and most important conservative gathering in the American political calendar, where the outlandish is commonplace. (read more)

I would disagree with the view expressed in the Guardian that says the Conservative Political Action Conference, "fires out scattergun wacky policies in hunt for victory," or "does not do moderation or restraint," or "it appears to maintain only a loose connection with political realities," or "where the outlandish is commonplace."

While the conference is unabashedly conservative, as the name implies, there was very little presence of the nutty right. There were paleoconsevatives, and libertarian conservatives, and religious conservative and conservatives whose primary focus was economics and conservatives whose primary focus was traditional values. However, there were very few right wing nut jobs. There were no racist or right wing militia-types.  There was only one session, out of about two hundred or so, that openly advocated nullification. There was no booth of the John Birch Society or the conspiratorial Alex Jones's Info Wars. There was not even a Glenn Beck booth. There was no seminars on Agenda 21 that I recall, and no talk about FEMA concentration camps.  This was a gathering of mainstream conservative, but a fairly big-tent gathering, and not all conservative agree on all issues, so on some issues there were panelist or speakers who advocated moderation on the issue of abortion or gay marriage or the war on drugs and there were some who ademantly advocated immigration reform while others denounced any immigration reform as amnesty. I think the Guardian wrote their story before attending the convention.

To read more on my experince at CPAC, follow this link. 

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