CPAC 2019 took place over the first weekend of March. As is usual at the annual meeting of wealthy conservatives looking for wealthy-donor money, there were no highlights per se, only disturbing lowlights and strange statements. The top name for conservatives to throw around these days is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She represents all of the things the Republican Party hates: women, people of color, and, of course, time.
A few weeks back, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, along with others, rolled out their hopes and expectations for a meaningful environmental political platform and direction for our country. Called the Green New Deal, it set forth the very ambitious goals we must all work to achieve in the hope of slowing down the change in our climate. A set of FAQs about the deal mentioned “farting cows,” a reference to cutting back on the number of cows we herd in the hopes of reducing the enormous amounts of methane they put out into our atmosphere. There are people working on solutions for the cow methane problem; some have seen positive results, such as adding seaweed to cows’ diets.
But the word “fart” really hit the Republican imagination, since Republicans don’t have much of an imagination when it comes to policy ideas. People like Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska quickly saw an opportunity to distract from, for instance, their cowardly histories in defense of putting suspected sexual assaulters on the Supreme Court.
Sen. Ted Cruz and his I-lost-to-Donald-Trump-and-humiliated-my-wife-and-child beard pandered to the conservative audience, saying dumb shit like, “By the way, I want to say, I support cows. I hope PETA is supporting the Republican Party now that the Democrats want to kill all of the cows.”
Yes. Hilarious. I can’t imagine why Republican voters chose a 6-foot-tall overweight moral boil with orange hair over him. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical hypocrite (redundant?) had this weird NRA-style threat to make while on stage with that epic disappointment of a son, Donald Trump Jr.
Falwell: I have 100 cows. You just try and let Alexandria Cortez come and try and take my cows away.
Trump Jr.: I love cows, Jerry. They’re delicious.
It’s like watching Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, Nichols and May, or the Smothers Brothers: Now we have the Juniors. Pretty racist guy that doesn’t like being known for his racism, Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, joked with the audience that the Green New Deal would make Chick-fil-A stock “go way up.” Get it?
Former deputy assistant to President Trump and Nazi-sympathizer-organization subscriber Sebastian Gorka took his faux aristocratic accent on stage to explain that Democrats “want to take your pickup truck, they want to rebuild your home, they want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.”
Seriously? Say what you want about Stalin and the atrocities he was responsible for, but none of those items were ever on his list of things to “take away” from the Soviet people under his rule.
Watch a supercut video that Vox’s Aaron Rupar tweeted.