While CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson attends the far-right Conservative Political Action Conference this week to accept an award from the far-far-right group, Accuracy In Media, perhaps she will have extra time to take in some of the discussions scheduled to take place.

According to the posted agenda, these will be among the CPAC offerings Attkisson could sit in on:

-“How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America”

-“Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department”

-“Obama vs. The Constitution: How a Harvard Law Graduate President Is Shredding the Constitution”

Fascinating topics, no doubt.

Of course, last year CPAC made news when it banned the conservative gay group, GOProud, from being a conference sponsor in 2012. GOProud's inclusion in 2011 prompted angry boycotts from social conservative groups. AIM itself has a long and disturbing history of publishing columns condemning gays and their “sympathizers” as subversive agents of death.

There really is no cockamamie conspiracy AIM hasn't pursued over the years, including its pathetic attempts to promote the “cover-up” surrounding the death of Clinton aide Vince Foster.

Which reminds me, when Attkisson has finished her ten-minute award ceremony remarks for the appreciative CPAC audience, maybe she'll get a chance to ask Cliff Kincaid, director of AIM's Center for Investigative Journalism, about all the reporting he's done on President Obama's birth certificate.

In case Attkisson hasn't had time to read up, here's a sample of Kincaid's penetrating birther analysis:

-"By releasing a copy of my own birth certificate, I have tried to demonstrate what other necessary information is lacking about Obama's birth."

- "The contrast between what is on so many birth certificates for ordinary Americans, such as mine, versus what the Obama campaign has released, is striking."

-" The only way to address these questions is to identify where exactly he was born, in what hospital, and what doctor was present."

-"Anybody who has an original copy of their own birth certificate, or a certified copy of their own original birth certificate, should immediately understand that the Obama version is lacking in basic information that should be publicly available."

You get the idea, even if CBS News does not: Sending a straight news reporter to an Obama-bashing conference to receive an award from a proud birther organization is a very, very bad idea, and one that will do needless damage to CBS' reputation.

As Media Matters accurately noted this week, AIM represents a “cesspool of hate and conspiracy theories.” That's not hyperbole. That's the documented truth; go read for yourself.

So that's a problem in terms of CBS News maintaining its reputation as an honest news broker. But that's not all. When you add onto that the myriad of loony conspiracy theories that AIM has pushed, the Attkisson decision makes even less sense. And when you top it off with the fact that AIM represented an engine that helped drive the blind idiocy behind the birther charade, then you really have to wonder what CBS News is trying to accomplish this week at CPAC.

According to a network spokesperson, “CBS News journalists are regularly honored by a broad spectrum of organizations for their outstanding original reporting.” That makes sense and I'm sure it's true. But at some point common sense ought to come into play.

Here's a simple, hypothetical question for CBS News executives: Eight years ago, would you have allowed a straight news reporter to accept an award from a radical left-wing group that dedicated untold hours trying to document how the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks? And would you have allowed your straight news reporter to receive the award, and to address an appreciative crowd, at a national conclave of Bush-hating nut jobs?

I didn't think so.