Once upon a time there was a dystopian novel, originally published in 1996, in which a candidate of the Republican religious right makes it to the presidency in 2004. The son of a racist truck-driver who first gets elected to the House of Representatives in the time of Newt Gingrich, his name was Jefferson Davis Hague. Hague won the Presidency on a platform of “ending welfare, cutting taxes, emasculating ‘government regulation’ [especially of the environment and for consumer protection], criminalizing abortion, banning ‘sodomy’ [gay marriage was hardly an issue when the book was written in 1994-95], and establishing ‘the centrality of God in America.’ ’’ (That phrase in the book was taken from a fund-raising letter circulated by Newt Gingrich in the summer of 1995.) Hague was able to win the presidency on a platform like that because his Democratic Party opponent was an old-fashioned Bill Clinton-like, Democratic Leadership Council type, center-right, “let’s-all-work-together-to-find-the-middle-ground,” Democrat. He had no stomach for fighting the kind of no-holds-barred fight that would have been necessary to defeat Hague. And so, with a massive turnout, especially of the Christian Right, Hague won easily.

For those of you who might not know (and I should think that most political types would, given the massive publicity on media of all stripes the event gets) something called the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) took place over this past weekend. It was funny, because when I heard about this year's event I thought "wait a minute; didn't they have one of these of few months ago?" No, I'm not losing it yet. That's just some evidence as to exactly how much the annual shindig is talked about.