Donald Trump invited to speak at CPAC. Is that a good idea?

“Donald Trump is an American patriot and success story with a massive following among small government conservatives,” said American Conservative Union chairman Al Cardenas in a statement. “I look forward to welcoming him back to the CPAC stage.”

Hmm. Is this really, you know, a good idea?

We can understand why The Donald himself would want to do it. It’s true that his 2011 speech produced loads of publicity. Of course, that’s back when he was toying with the idea of running for president himself, or at least pretending to think about a run for the Oval Office. Any attention this drew to “Celebrity Apprentice” or the various Trump golf projects around the world was purely incidental, we’re sure.

And as a card-carrying member of the mainstream media (non-elite division), we’re overjoyed to link “Trump” and “politics” in sentences once again. He produces controversy as easily as most humans exhale carbon dioxide. Who can forget his proposal to slap a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese goods? Certainly not US retail chains, which would have seen the prices of all their Chinese-made goods go up by the same amount. And remember when he kept challenging President Obama for his long-form birth certificate? And then Mr. Obama broke into the “Celebrity Apprentice” time slot to announce that the United States had killed Osama bin Laden? That’s in the dictionary now as a usage example for “kismet.”