I said that the annual CPAC conference that was held last weekend is where the most extreme right wing crazies come to strut their stuff and have aspiring politicians pander to them.

It turns out that I was wrong. Believe it or not there are people who are deemed to be too crazy even to be invited to speak at CPAC and so they had their own little parallel shindig in a different part of the same building, in a basement somewhere.

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones had the fortitude to attend and report on what that was like.

In the bowels of the National Harbor convention center in suburban Maryland on Thursday, a nonprofit called Empact America schooled attendees about the threat of a terrorist attack by way of an electromagnetic pulse. Former Reagan Defense Department official Frank Gaffney articulated his view that anti-tax activist and American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist is an undercover agent for the Muslim Brotherhood. Ginni Thomas, a Daily Caller contributor and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, alleged that President Barack Obama may be guilty of providing material support for terrorism.

Murphy also writes of other crazies who had been part of CPAC in past years but have not been invited back: Pamela Gellar, Allan West, John Derbyshire, Wayne Allyn Root, Bishop Harry Jackson, Thomas Woods, and others, a Who’s Who of nuttiness.

These exclusions suggest to Murphy that CPAC is getting soft, though at most that would be clearly just a matter of degree. CPAC is still crazy after all these years. The fact that Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump were featured CPAC speakers was proof of that.