A Deal Even Judd Gregg Could Refuse

This has got to be one of the most garishly "Noooo shit!" ledes of all time:

Saying, "I made a mistake," Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire abruptly withdrew as commerce secretary nominee on Thursday and drew a testy reaction from the White House, suddenly coping with the third Cabinet withdrawal of Barack Obama's young presidency.

Gregg cited "irresolvable conflicts" with Obama's handling of the economic stimulus and 2010 census in a statement released without warning by his Senate office.

Later, at a news conference in the Capitol, he sounded more contrite.

"The president asked me to do it," he said of the job offer. "I said, 'Yes.' That was my mistake."

"Mistake"?  Selling out his depleted Senate caucus, conceding his seat to the Dems, either immediately or (with apologies to John Sununu) in 2010, in favor of going to work for the enemy, was a "mistake"?  Well, yeah, I guess it would have been.  But just exactly why did it take two weeks for Senator Gregg to remember that he's a Republican?  Didn't he already KNOW that he had "irresolvable conflicts" with the openly Marxist Little President?  Could he possibly be surprised by Red Barry's dishonest, dictatorial jam down of Hogzilla or Raum Emanuel's castrating double-cross of taking the Census Bureau out of the Commerce Department's jurisdiction in order to, in Mark Noonan's colorful phrase, "gerrymander the United States"?  And how pathetic has the GOP become that this belated-but-day-glo-obvious epiphany is getting hailed on the Right as making Gregg "one of the most powerful men in Washington" and even drafted as a 2012 presidential candidate when about the best face you can put on the man's incomprehensible cross-aisle daliance is that he managed to wake up from his "bipartisan" stupor in the nick of time?

I think Gregg was all set to be assimilated into the Donk Collective, "stimulus" or no "stimulus," and then King Hussein's Esperanza Piñiero not so much "overreached" (since they'll politicize the 2010 census in any case) as reflexively rubbed Gregg's nose in the abject, dripping contempt that Obamunists feel for conservatives and Republicans in general and "bipartisan outreachers" in particular.  Emanuel, in other words, tried to cut Gregg's balls off and make him eat them, and he'd finally had enough.

Does this fiasco make Lucifer look bad?  I suppose it does, but certainly no worse than the undervetted disasters of Tim Geithner, Bill Richardson, and Tom Daschle did.  Does it make his claim to "bipartisanism," which he reiterated in his "We're sorry it didn't work out (not)" statement, look phonier than a Bill Clinton pick-up line?  Sure, but as the Hogzilla process has depressingly demonstrated, all the "bipartisanism" the Little President really needs is three Senate Republicans, and he already knows THEIR price.

Screwing up the assimilation of Judd Gregg is to Red Barry what losing a hundred dollar bill in the laundry is to George Soros - an extraneous bonus to a man with an unconscionable excess of them.  Escaping assimilation for Judd Gregg only brings into question his political judgment in allowing the Dem drones to get their nanoprobe tubules so close to his jugular in the first place.

UPDATE: How DARE Judd Gregg not bow down to the Chosen One!: