I've been pushing this story for a while, but it finally made the Washington City Paper.
Conservative Dan Borchers writes the weekly column “On The Right Track” for
www.whoslying.org, and is often very critical of Ann Coulter. In retaliation, Coulter has had him banned from radio interviews and the CPAC conference. Here's an excerpt.
Dan Borchers wishes Republicans would do the right thing.It's Thursday morning, around 10, and the lobby of the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington is swarming with ambitious teenagers. Most of them are in suits, with a few exceptions: the boy in the red "Viva la Revolution" T-shirt with the picture of Ronald Reagan, the girl in the tight "I (heart) G.W.B." baby T. On the second floor, up the escalator, staffers from the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition are setting up booths. Secret Service agents walk through the crowd, securing the area for the arrival of Vice President Dick Cheney. A guy selling "I Hate the French" vanilla ice cream stacks his quart cartons into a triangle.
Dan Borchers should be right at home here. Borchers, 49, is a secretary at a labormanagement organization who, in his spare time, runs a trio of conservative news and commentary Web sites from his Odenton, Md., home. This is his sixth straight year coming to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), possibly the largest gathering of right-wing activists to take place anywhere in the country. A soft-spoken military veteran, Borchers likes to wax nostalgic about the greatness of Ronald Reagan and the virtues of godly women. He endorsed John Ashcroft when Ashcroft was nominated to be attorney general, believes in the "ex-gay" movement, and wears a gold pin shaped like two small fetal feet on his lapel to signal his opposition to abortion.
Borchers has come, he says, to interview the cavalcade of prominent politicians and activists who gravitate to the conference for the opportunity to commune with the true believers. The interviews, he says, will provide fodder for his Web sites and for a book he is working on, Conservatism and the Enemy Within.
But when Borchers tried to register for a press pass for this year's conference, organizers turned him down. It didn't, he admits, come as a complete shock: In 2002, Borchers was escorted to his car after CPAC officials objected to his distributing his newsletter at the conference. Last year, officials wouldn't even let him in.