The Virginia Conservative Network had  a special guest speaker this weekend: former Congressman Eric Cantor! Cantor, the only House Majority Leader in US history who was defeated by a virtually unfunded, no-name challenger (by 10 percentage points!), lectured on "How to Win Elections".

This article appeared in the Washington Post, not The Onion. (Although sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.)

According to organizers, Cantor gave an invitation-only crowd of more than 100 tips on how to frame their message to voters as Republicans prepare to defend their slim majority in the state Senate this year.

100 tips! The Washington Post, with its reputation for writing in-depth articles that cover every angle, nonetheless ran short on space on its website and so couldn't list a single one of them. But maybe we can guess at some of them.

1) When you're campaigning for amnesty for children of illegal aliens, as Cantor did extensively, don't call it amnesty, call it "Comprehensive Immigration Reform".

2) Talk about cutting wasteful government spending but be sure not to name any specific programs that your opponent in the general election could pin you down on.

3) Say you want to repeal Obamacare and then hold one or more purely symbolic votes per session to do just that; but don't mix that contentious stuff with the serious business of passing a budget.

4) The fewer people who know what's in the budget, the better. If you give more than 24 hours notice and the budget is less than 1000 pages, you're not expediting.

5) Say you're going to investigate abuses at the IRS and the NSA, but don't poison relations with the executive branch once you're actually in a position to govern. After all, you want to govern responsibly and reach across the aisle, don't you?

Cantor was joined by Linwood Cobb, his right-hand man in the party’s Seventh District Committee whose ouster foreshadowed Cantor’s own demise.

Good, they brought in more experts!

And by the way, the Virginia Conservative Network has nothing to do with conservatives.

The day-long meeting of the Virginia Conservative Network featured a who’s who of establishment Republicans in the mold of Cantor

Maybe calling themselves conservative was one of those 100 tips!

So an organization that calls itself conservative, but isn't, gets a lecture on winning elections by someone who can't. What's next, inviting Mitt Romney to explain how to win presidential elections?