By JOHN KANELIS / [email protected]

Someone a whole lot smarter than I am will have to explain what in the name of political sanity has happened to the modern U.S. conservative movement.

I am sitting out here in Flyover Country looking at the parade of goofballs, lunatics, seditionists and cult followers traipsing onto the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I am shaking my head in utter disbelief.

These loons stand before the adoring CPAC crowd and denigrate actual conservatives and true-blue Republicans. These are the folks who have had the gumption to be critical of the Loon in Chief, Donald Trump. That’s it. That is their mortal sin, in the eyes of these morons.

The real conservatives aren’t invited to attend this event. They are basically booed in absentia off the stage whenever someone, such as Ted Cruz, mentions their names out loud.

I am not a conservative, so I have no particular dog in that fight. I am just a spectator and a blogger who wonders — as is my right — about the health of a once-vibrant political movement.

Were I to diagnose the well-being of the conservative movement, I would declare it to be taken over by body snatchers. They are no longer a viable political movement, a governing philosophy. They are loyal to an imbecile who in the course of four years as president of the United States managed:

To run up the greatest national debt in history, alienated this nation from our most valuable international allies, destroyed the decorum associated with the highest office in the land, took dead aim at ethnic and racial minorities, was impeached twice by Congress — the second time for inciting an insurrection — and then lied to the nation and allowed many hundreds of thousands of Americans to die needlessly from a killer virus that has swept over the world.

However, the cultists at CPAC have invited Donald J. Trump to speak and for him to declare that some phony “revolution” he proclaims to lead will continue into the future.

I believe with all my soul that Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald W. Reagan are spinning their graves … and that were they around today none of them would be allowed to speak at today’s perverted gathering of so-called conservatives.