THE PARTY'S OVER...

Did Rep. McHenry procure the model for this CPAC poster from his stable?

Well, the CPAC conventioneers have mostly all slept it off by now and are heading back to their dreary lives, having booed and humiliated their party's senile and doddering presumptive nominee. Despite being banned by the organizers, Ann Coulter managed to sneak in and make a spectacle of herself. In the process, she got far more applause than poor old McCain. Maybe the Republicans should put together a dream ticket of McCain/Coulter or Coulter/McCain... doesn't really matter, except for the people who write footnotes in political science books.

And speaking of spectacles, these were the signs that the janitorial staff were sweeping up and stuffing in dumpsters this morning. This isn't a joke; these are the classy signs the classy Republicans had up at their little conference, a little conference that included speeches by Bush, Cheney, McCain, Gingrich, Coulter, Romney and dozens of Republican elected officials. These people have... well, like I said yesterday, reptilian minds.

You can find all the signs here but here are a couple of the biggies. The one up top was a favorite of Republican Senators Larry Craig, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham and positively made GOP Congressmen David Dreier, Patrick McHenry, Dana Rohrabacher, and Jim McCrery call for their smelling salts.












UPDATE: NEWSWEEK WONDERING WHY RIGHTIST LEADERS GAVE McCAIN THE FINGER.

I guess Newsweek missed the decorations in the exhibit hall. They caught on to the vibe though: rage and insanity for a dying, illegitimate, impotent, and frustrated political elite.

No one knew this better than McCain himself as he strode to the podium of CPAC's annual meeting in the Omni Shoreham Hotel, a gathering that served as ground zero for the right-wing outrage last week. McCain had snubbed this convocation for years. But now the McCainiacs were growing worried that conservative Republicans would not rally on voting day and perhaps stay home. "The Republican Party needs to find its bottom," says conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck. "I'm an alcoholic. I understand what it means to bottom out. When you find your bottom—when you say, 'I can't live like this anymore, I can't live this lie'—that's when Republicans and conservatives will start doing some real soul-searching to determine what their values are."

McCain and his campaign know that the conservative uprising poses serious practical problems as well. A senior McCain aide, who didn't want to be named talking about the campaign's woes, cites the difficulty in fund-raising that the candidate faced a year ago when GOP critics targeted his compromise position on immigration reform. (McCain championed a bill with archliberal Ted Kennedy that would have allowed illegal aliens to participate in a worker-visa program. He later retreated.) Campaign donations quickly dried up—particularly among small donors, whose checks are looked upon as an indication of how much grass-roots support a candidate is getting. Aides privately worry that more barking from McCain's critics could create a similar scenario—a devastating financial blow in an election year when Republicans are already being outspent and outraised by Democrats. "We can get past people bashing us—even [George W.] Bush got some of that," says a McCain adviser, who declined to be named discussing internal strategy. "But if it starts affecting [the money], it's a problem." Coulter tells Newsweek that she herself was "rather surprised at how ferocious and immediate the support was for my preference for Hillary over McCain on the Internet and in my In box. I thought it would take me a few more times at bat to explain my position fully. Oh no, no, no!"

...Coulter, whom many conservative politicos privately deride as an attention seeker, says she has been contacted by [McCain] emissaries she won't identify. "Yes, I won't reveal private communications, but they were friendly on both sides," she says. "Behind the scenes, McCain's people are demanding that TV and radio banish me, so I guess I'm at least as likely to be audited by a McCain administration as a Clinton administration."