Last week, I attended — well, really, infiltrated is the proper word — CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC. A gathering of true believers, donors, hucksters, pundits and politicians of the extreme right-wing conservative momement, CPAC has, for a number of decades, been the premier venue for those seeking to court the votes of the nation's most reactionary thinkers. Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney spoke at this year's CPAC, and I was there; Mitt Romney announced the suspension of his campaign at this year's CPAC (to the great disappointment of the right-wing faithful, who had inexplicably anointed him the new successor to St. Reagan), and I was there. More importantly to Screengrab readers, though, there were exclusive screenings of a number of new films made by and targeted at the extreme right, and once again, I was there.

The first of the three films I saw during CPAC was Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Like most of the rest of the 'documentaries' shown at the conference, Expelled — directed by Nathan Frankowski, who also worked on the ideologically motivated TV movie The Path to 9/11 — is little more than pure propaganda. Of course, the same argument can be made (and is, endlessly, by the constantly complaining voices of power at CPAC) about any number of left-leaning documentaries, a number of which are up for Academy Awards this year. The main difference is that those movies tend to be made by professional filmmakers with ideological leanings, and thus maintain a certain level of basic professionalism, while the propaganda films of the right tend to be made by professional ideologues with a smattering of training in filmmaking and are almost totally unwatchable from an aesthetic standpoint. The makers of Expelled, at the very least, grace us with a professional actor as its primary spokesman and delivery vector for the sub-Michael Moore schtick that comprises most of the film: it's Ben Stein, a right-wing opinion columnist, former Nixon speechwriter and one-time game show host best known for his appearance as the "Bueller...? Bueller...?" teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Expelled's central thesis is that an arrogant cabal of Marxist academics, politically correct leftists, and scientific ideologues are conspiring to keep the teaching of "Intelligent Design" — a non-theory that is essentially creation science dressed up and given a new set of buzzwords — off of college campuses. In aid of this theses, Stein wanders around with a camera crew, engaging in Moorean antics that involve him drawing calculated outrage and obnoxious bluster from a number of scientists, academics, and other detractors of ID. If all you want to do is upset authority figures, of course, it's not hard to do; people like Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers are easy to rile up, especially when confronted with an irritating talk-show host berating them about their unwillingness to discuss total nonsense. If you want to see a bunch of straw men soaked with seltzer, Expelled attains a certain level of success; the right people are made to look foolish or self-important, if for all the wrong reasons.

However, if you want to see what the movie actually promises — a genuinely successful argument over why Intelligent Design should or should not be taught in schools — you'd best look elsewhere. The movie spends very little time in discussing the actual hypotheses of ID, no doubt because they're largely open-ended and unfalsifiable, and thus poor science. It's not so much a theory as it is a loosely slapped-together, multi-pronged critique of other theories, and is no more science than the man in the moon or the tooth fairy. (Curiously, for all the film's bluster about "academic freedom" and First Amendment rights — which, of course, have nothing to do with what should be taught in science classes — Stein is never seen arguing that Babylonian creation myths or the theories of Scientology should be given equal time. Apparently, only his favored form of nonsense suffers from exclusion.) Since any legitimate confrontation between Intelligent Design and actual science would end badly for ID, the movie focuses on making ID's opponents look like censors (as if the teaching of science was a democratic practice, where all possible ideas are presented and then people vote on which one they like the best) or anti-Christian bigots or wordy, incomprehensible windbags.

It's a pure hatchet job, plain and simple, without any scientific merit and very little artistic merit. Worse still, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a fundamentally dishonest film: it's funded by right-wing think tanks, its marketing materials urge the formation of politically-motivated 'street teams' to push for screenings of the movie before they've even seen it (a tactic likely motivated by the fact that no one would book the thing based on its qualities as a film), and hosted by a political hack for either mercenary or ideological reasons. Stein does deliver a few amusing moments with his deadpan delivery, but it's nothing you couldn't get in equal amounts from one of his Clear Eyes commercials in less than thirty seconds and without the added burden of vast, pseudoscientific nonsense. Sadly, Expelled, worthless as it is, was the best of the three movies I saw at CPAC; stay tuned for further reports.

(For pure delusional self-pity, it's hard to beat the Expelled movie blog; their latest entry claims that, since those meddlesome Washington bureaucrats combined Lincoln and Washington's birthdays into President's Day, "Darwin Day has now supplanted Lincoln's birthday in the public imagination"! Yes, who can forget those long Darwin Day weekends, when the family gathers around a copy of Origin of Species and makes a little wooden model of the Galapagos Islands before setting out for a big trip to the mall for one of the many Darwin Day sales?)