Frank Gaffney has been a leading figure in the neoconservative movement for over two decades, having served in the Reagan Pentagon and founded a national security think tank. But Gaffney was absent from the panels and podiums at the year’s biggest conservative conference, CPAC, despite having spoken at the annual event held this weekend for the past 15 years. Gaffney had vowed to boycott the conference this year because, he claimed, it had been infiltrated by Islamic extremists. Specifically, he pointed to Grover Norquist, the influential anti-tax activist, and Suhail Kahn, who directed Muslims outreach efforts for the Bush White House. He accuses the two of being moles for the Muslim Brotherhood.

However, ThinkProgress has learned that Gaffney was actually prohibited from participating in CPAC — disinvited from speaking this year by conference organizers fed up with his increasingly vicious attacks on fellow conservative leaders. Indeed, Gaffney appears to have invented the entire theory about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating CPAC as a pretext to explain his absence from the event.

A source close to conference organizers told ThinkProgress that Gaffney was “specifically not to be invited” to speak at the conference this year because CPAC Chairman David Keene and other conservatives were “sick of him” attacking other conservatives. “The whole boycott thing was just to save face,” the source said. (Gaffney did show up to CPAC to conduct some interviews, including one with ThinkProgress, but did not participate in any official capacity).

Keene confirmed to ThinkProgress that “we weren’t going to invite him to speak this year,” but said, “we didn’t announce or tell him that.” In a statement provided by a spokesperson, Keene had some strong words for Gaffney, saying he has become “obsessed with his weird belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with him on everything all the time” is either “ignorant” or “dupes of the nation’s enemies” (full statement after the jump):

Having said that, we didn’t announce or tell him that we weren’t going to invite him to speak this year. We covered the issues in which he is interested (and which interest many of our registrants) and we did manage to do so without him. I do know that he attended CPAC and made his views known to as many as would listen through the talk shows on radio row.

The simple fact is that while Frank Gaffney did yeoman work on issues like missile defense in years passed, he has become personally and tiresomely obsessed with his weird belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with him on everything all the time or treat him with the respect and deference he believes is his due, must be either ignorant of the dangers we face or, in extreme case, dupes of the nation’s enemies.

The CPAC issue is just part of “a larger pattern” with Gaffney that goes back several years, the source told ThinkProgress. Since Gaffney began his public attacks on Norquist and Kahn shortly after September 11th, he has allegedly been reprimanded by a number of prominent conservatives or his attacks, such as the leadership of the secretive Council for National Policy and the late Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation. Several years ago, he also became “the only person to have ever been kicked out” of Norquist’s famous Wednesday Meeting strategy sessions with conservative leaders. Gaffney and Norquist used to be friends and sit next to each other at the well-attended gatherings, the source said, but Noquist barred Gaffney “in writing” several years ago, sending a letter announcing Gaffney’s exile to over 100 regular attendees.

The theory that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the conservative movement is ridiculous on its face, but it now seems clear that is was merely a convenient fabrication to protect Gaffney’s ego. Nonetheless, Gaffney’s invention has taken hold in the paranoid right. Conservative blogger Pam Geller, who has close ties to Gaffney, pushed the theory at CPAC while Fox News host Glenn Beck advanced it on his radio show today. A CPAC panel involving Kahn even devolved into an ugly shouting match Saturday.

Gaffney has “never ever tried to get the truth,” the source said, “and even if he finds the truth, he just keeps going” — “I really think he just raises so much money off this stuff that he really doesn’t care.” Indeed, Gaffney made nearly $300,000 in 2008 from his think tank, according to IRS documents. The organization, which appears to have few paid officers, brought in over $4 million in contributions that year.

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The religious right has grown apoplectic over what it sees as the harbingers of its demise: gay conservatives. The emergence of the GOProud, a right-wing group of conservatives that support gay rights, is spurring a civil war between conservative bigwigs. This summer, WorldNetDaily publisher and proud “birther king” Joseph Farah and right-wing ranter Ann Coulter launched into a hyperbolic squabble after Coulter agreed to keynote GOProud’s inaugural “Homocon” conference. Fearful of GOProud’s impending “coup” of the conservative movement, Farah even called for extra security at his WND conference panel “is GOProud conservative?” because, as his loyal followers noted, GOProud could bring its “radical gay” supporters to help in its “infiltration of the conservative movement.”

Ever vigilant against “twisted and dangerous” threat of gay conservatives, right-wing groups are now repudiating any person, place, or thing that may associate with these wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing, most notably the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Despite receiving flak last year for their association with GOProud, CPAC organizers recently confirmed that GOProud will be a “participating organization,” at next year’s conference, “the second highest level of participation. As a ‘participating organization,’ GOProud has a voice in planning the conference.”

The possible presence of gay people sparked the far-right American Principles Project to instigate a growing boycott of CPAC in November. Yesterday, WND announced that the Family Research Council and the Concerned Women for America are now the most high-profile conservative groups to join the boycott:

Two of the nation’s premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited.

“We’ve been very involved in CPAC for over a decade and have managed a couple of popular sessions. However, we will no longer be involved with CPAC because of the organization’s financial mismanagement and movement away from conservative principles,” said Tom McClusky, senior vice president for FRC Action.

“CWA has decided not to participate in part because of GOProud,” CWA President Penny Nance told WND.

FRC and CWA join the American Principles Project, American Values, Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and the National Organization for Marriage in withdrawing from CPAC.

The far-right Americans for Truth about Homosexuality president Peter LaBarbera, who is also boycotting CPAC, finds it “gratifying to to see FRC and CWA respond appropriately to CPAC’s moral sellout of allowing GOProud as a sponsor.” “By bringing in GOProud, CPAC was effectively saying moral opposition to homosexuality is no longer welcome in the conservative movement.”

This increasingly popular censure of CPAC is not just limited to GOProud itself, but to lawmakers as well. As Right Wing Watch notes, CPAC isn’t just “one of the largest gatherings of right wing activists,” but a long-standing, popular “platform for Republican presidential candidates.” Indeed, possible 2012 GOP presidential candidates Gov. Haley Barbour (MS), Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MN), Rep. Mike Pence (IN), and Sen. John Thune (SD) are slated to speak at CPAC next year. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Thune have already come under fire for their association with GOProud.

GOProud has dismissed this kind of far-right thinking before as “clearly out of the mainstream.” However, given the GOP’s number one priority and its penchant for “out of the mainstream,” Republicans may not have room for GOProud’s brand of thought, no matter how conservative.

Though some conservatives are declaring that last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was “wildly successful,” this year’s annual gathering of movement conservatives has actually exposed “lingering divisions on the right.” In a Fox News interview on Saturday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee questioned the “credibility” of the event, accusing it of being “a pay-for-play” because “of the way that it solicits sponsors.” Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin also criticized CPAC’s set-up, refusing to appear because she reportedly views it as “pocketbook over policy.”

But the biggest rift occurred around the prominence of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and his libertarian supporters. According to the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel, after CPAC organizers announced that Paul had won the presidential straw poll with 31 percent of the vote, “mainstream GOP activists and traditional conservative thinkers” were looking for excuses:

Just as relieved were mainstream GOP activists and traditional conservative thinkers who were pondering ways to make the party electable again. “I think Mitt Romney’s 22 percent was impressive,” said Rob Willington, a Massachusetts Republican strategist who’d designed GOTV technology for now-Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.). He was reflecting on the poll — not too significant, he said — in Murphy’s, a bar a few blocks from the hotel, late Saturday. Romney’s forces, he said, hadn’t lifted a finger; Paul’s had campaigned for the prize.

In another corner of the bar, conservative author David Frum, editor of Frum Forum (formerly New Majority), brushed off the result. “The Paul people all voted and the others didn’t,” said Frum. “I’m hoping it’s a matter of self-selection.”

The importance of minimizing Paul’s win united conservative activists like almost nothing else that came from the three-day conference. Even Brad Dayspring — who, as a spokesman for GOP whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), counts on Paul for “no” votes — fired off two tweets dismissing the result. But the 2,395 ballots cast were a CPAC record, up from the 1,757 cast in 2009, when Mitt Romney scored his third conservative win.

On his radio show yesterday, hate radio host Rush Limbaugh decried Paul’s win as well:

RUSH: All I’ll tell you is that any organization that has a straw poll vote on who the party presidential candidate ought to be and comes up with Ron Paul is not an organization of conservatives. I just tell you. Something’s haywire there. I know the Ron Paul people go in there, but they had been attendees to get in there. Ron Paul winning a straw poll at a conservative conference?

Huckabee also claimed that Paul’s win challenged the conservative credentials of CPAC, saying “that Ron Paul winning the straw poll was an indicator that CPAC was taking a more libertarian flavor.” The tension between Paul-supporting libertarians and social conservatives like Huckabee was on full display Saturday when a Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) activist responded harshly to positive words from a Paul supporter about CPAC’s inclusion of the conservative gay group GOProud. “I want to condemn CPAC for bringing GOProud to this event,” said YAF’s Ryan Sorba after Students for Liberty’s Alexander McCobin praised the American Conservative Union for “welcoming GOProud as a co-sponsor.”

The extremist Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is being fueled by Big Oil. CPAC’s “Radio Row” — featuring “top conservative talk show hosts” — is officially sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the “only national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry.” ThinkProgress is at the convention and took a picture of the prominent API sign:

Although API concedes that oil and gas pollution “may be helping to warm our planet by enhancing the natural greenhouse effect of the atmosphere,” the participants at CPAC believe global warming is a hoax. On the other hand, one would expect that the attendees — who decry groups with “allies like Iran” — would not want to take money from oil companies doing business in countries with ties to terrorism.