Let me begin this post with some helpful tips for anyone, anywhere who is organizing an event with speakers.

First, very few people are worth listening to for more than a minute and most of the ones who are tend to speak for a living. Resist the urge to let everyone who had anything to do with organizing the event hang out at the mic until most of the audience wants to stick knitting needles in their eyes just so they can be distracted from the amplified boredom at the podium.

Second, when introducing an important speaker, make it snappy. Your job is to get up there, reel off the highlights from the speaker’s bio and get him/her up on stage. You are not there to give a speech before the speech. And one person can handle the introduction. Yesterday I was afraid that Steve Poizner was going to miss the election he’s running in because they kept trotting people up to the podium to go into great detail about how well they knew him. I think the introduction is actually still going on in a parallel universe.

There were speakers scheduled all weekend long, even at the mixer, which seriously killed the whole mixing vibe. I was afraid that if I went into a stall in the men’s room someone would be standing on the toilet, ready to “blah, blah” for fifteen minutes.

So much for the hints, let’s move on to the silliness.

On Saturday morning we were treated to some guy giving a speech about impeaching President Obama. All of the bloggers in attendance just looked at each other with that “Please God, let me keep breakfast down,” look. Yes, every political movement has its lunatic fringe but that doesn’t mean we need to indulge them because they write checks. Conservatives have plenty of issues we can win on, we don’t need side show b.s. like impeachment talk and birth certificate nonsense. These people destroy sincere efforts by people on the Right to get any kind of narrative going about the real issues.

Melissa Clouthier has her and Ed Morrisey’s response to the speech here. I wasn’t going to give any publicity, I merely retweeted something Melissa said about it being the dumbest idea ever.

The morning finished with a dust-up between filmmaker John Ziegler and David Keene from the American Conservative Union (the sponsor of CPAC). Ed has details and video at Hot Air.

My advice to anyone who finds themselves in this position: if you want to get away from a camera, don’t stop and tell the camera guy to shut the thing off. He won’t. Go to your hotel room. Take a leak. Run (It’s very difficult for a guy with a camera to chase someone who is running away-try it, it’s fun!). Anything. If you stop and let your anger get the best of you on camera it’s not going to look good for you.

Ever.

The Ziegler thing got even weirder when he returned and sat down for lunch. They actually called the police and were working on a way to stealthily remove him from his fajitas while Poizner was speaking. Brilliant. I tried to explain to some of the event staff that the bloggers were going to have a field day with the video footage we were all ready to take once it went down. After much discussion, they made the right choice and decided not to have an episode of “WCPAC Cops” filmed and go viral.

Morrissey says the final act of the drama was “completely avoidable”. I would say that the whole thing may have been avoidable. Never give an interview to a guy with a camera if there are ANY questions you don’t want to answer.

Or make something up.

That’s what I do.