George Will is asked about Glenn Beck speaking at the CPAC 2010 and the conference embracing the Tea Party movement and the presence of the John Birch Society and Will does his best to downplay both. Just college kids and some fringe elements of the party. Nothing to see here... move along now. Sorry George but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Your party wants to embrace the crazies for political gain... you own them. Will also ignores that the "over-the-top rhetoric" was coming from his fellow speakers, not some college kids.
MORAN: And let me begin, George, with what we just saw, Glenn Beck, there, taking aim at the Republican Party, CPAC embracing the tea party movement, in a way. What does -- what does it mean, this libertarian tea party streak coming into the movement conservatives, coming into the Republican Party?
WILL: They're natural Republicans. They're not all Republicans. In fact, one-fifth of the people who identify themselves as tea party supporters voted for Barack Obama. And one-third of them express approval of Barack Obama. But they are alarmed and anxious and fearful about what the government is doing.
CPAC has been meeting for decades in one of Washington's largest hotels. This year, they had to move to a larger hotel. So the energy, the intensity in American politics, right now, is on the right. And this is partly because a lot of the people who come to CPAC are college students. They're young. And so there's a bit of over-the-top rhetoric, as you would expect.
And when you're a year after a party has just lost the presidency, and you don't have -- the faces of the next generation aren't clear, it's the hour of the entertainer. And they had a lot of entertainers there.
[...]
MORAN: Anger. George, does it bother you at all that the John Birch Society is back inside the tent after Bill Buckley spent decades trying to run that wing of the party out?
WILL: It's a big tent. And the tent is a circus imagery. And so you have a freak show side of it. But this is a trivial, infinitesimal, not-noticeable thing, other than by people eager to discredit the Republican Party.
