What the withdrawal means

Dave Weigel on Judd Gregg's doubleplusheroic withdrawal from the job he wanted in the first place:

Before the Gregg withdrawal, Republicans were piling on the White House for trying to devolve some (not all) of the management of the Census from the Commerce Department to the White House. Is that the new Republican rallying cry? No, it’s another example of the party careening from message to message.

If 2010 rolls around and the GOP is running “Return full Census management responsibilities to the Department of Commerce!” ads in swing states, obviously, I’ll eat my words.

What conservatives mean when they say that the Gregg withdrawal is a return to fundamental principle only makes sense if that principle is knee-jerk opposition to the new administration. And, indeed, for quite some time now the right has been primarily interested in opposing whatever liberals want. How else to explain the disagreement over climate change? You would think that, given the mountains of scientific evidence and lack of credible, credentialed opponents of the theory (GOP members of Congress do not count) that opposing climate change would simply be insane. It is, and the absolute certainty with which they oppose it--the sheer unwillingness to admit even a sliver of a possibility that they are wrong--suggests that, as far as the conservative base is concerned, if liberals believe it it must be wrong. The enormity of the consequences--millions of deaths, natural disasters, famines when previously fertile land no longer grows things--evidently has no bearing on them.

And Barack Obama thinks he can work with these people? Better to make overtures but to count on working the handful of Senate RINOs to get his agenda passed. In any event, I do not think that this rededication to mindless opposition is a return to anything for the GOP: it's not as though they ever stopped doing it.

Update: Weigel reports that House Republicans aren't letting the census argument go. This is really stupid. Do these people not realize that we're in a recession? That people are taking pay cuts, losing jobs, worried about mortgages, etc.? Even in better times nobody would care about the census. These people are idiots, and their obsession with winning news cycles and headlines is pathological. Obama ought to laugh at these fools, then pick a solid Democrat for the post who favors the sampling techniques Republicans hate. Problem solved.