CPAC 2011 begins this Thursday, and The American Conservative will be playing several roles. Our “On War” columnist and director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation, William S. Lind, will be making the case for slashing the defense budget on a panel at 11 am Friday morning in the Harding room of D.C.’s Marriott Wardman Park (the CPAC venue). Yours truly will be making some introductory remarks for Joseph Salerno’s “Unmasking the Federal Reserve” talk, as part of the Campaign for Liberty’s panoply of events. The Salerno talk is at 11 am Saturday in the Virginia Ballroom. C4L also has TAC TV star Jack Hunter and TAC contributing editors Tom Woods and James Bovard taking part in several events — see the full schedule of Campaign for Liberty CPAC activities here.

TAC personnel will have literature available and be helping out at the Committee for the Republic booth, and the committee has what promises to be a very lively panel, featuring Bruce Fein on the topic of cutting the defense budget and returning to a small-r republican foreign policy, at 1 pm Thursday in the Virginia Ballroom. Donald Rumsfeld may be receiving a “Defender of the Constitution” award — they must mean the Soviet constitution — but in many ways this looks to be a very bad CPAC for neocons.