The Best of CPAC

I have been watching some of the featured CPAC speeches online. I liked Rubio, Gingrich and Pence. I really liked Beck. As usual, he was very entertaining, and I particularly appreciated his quip that America needs "less Marx and more Madison." There were many other interesting speakers who enunciated the frustrations that conservatives feel at the radically left administration of Barack Obama, and who also proposed conservative solutions for the problems that Obama is creating and exacerbating. But for my money, the best speaker by far was George Will.

Mr. Will has been at this game for several decades but he has lost none of his insight, humor or droll wit. In a devastatingly clever half hour, he skewered statists, lambasted liberals, pounded progressives and damned the dependency agenda of the Obama administration. I cannot do him justice with selective quotes, but here are a few of my favorites (paraphrased, of course): (i) thanks to one of our nanny-state regulatory agencies, you can now buy a letter opener with "requires safety goggles" stamped on it; (ii) a hysterical Agriculture Department bureaucrat explained to a colleague that he was crestfallen "because his farmer died"; (iii) the Obama administration can imagine a world without the internal combustion engine, but not without Chrysler Corporation; (iv) Democrats encourage envy as social policy, oblivious to the fact that it is the only one of the seven deadly sins that entails not even momentary pleasure for the sinner; (v) VAT is a French word for huge government; and (vi) Americans could honor Jack Kennedy's request to "ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country" by creating a spacious portion of their lives for which the government is not responsible. I urge the reader to go to http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4830692 to view the whole speech.