They call it "intellectual consistency."

How one stupid position unmoored to fact set off a cascading pile of stupid  among conservatives:

Even if Congressional Republicans weren’t working to keep progress on Capitol Hill at a continual halt, even if they didn’t make passing something like a budget all but impossible, getting the funding to protect the East Coast from storms like Sandy approved would be a difficult task at best.

For one thing, they’ve put themselves in a position where they are almost forced to oppose spending on disaster mitigation. Approving funding to prevent hurricane damage means acknowledging that there is a continuing danger from hurricanes and that it is getting worse, and that means acknowledging that the funding is not just part of some liberal global-warming conspiracy. (An example, from Heritage’s Katherine Rosario: “Rather than concretely helping hurricane victims rebuild and get on their feet, which would be a more proper manifestation of the federal government’s role in our lives, they’ve taken it upon themselves to decide to spend our money to change the climate of our planet.”)

Worse, though, is that the right’s lack of foresight isn’t restricted to this one issue. Funding projects that might help Americans who haven’t even been born yet might be good policy, but it’s not going to get anyone elected. So instead of considering those projects rationally, leading Republicans now strip them of context and mock them for political gain; indeed, they’ve made doing so into a habit. They do so safely, knowing that there’s little risk that they’ll pay any price when it turns out that one of those projects might have saved lives. By contrast, John Boehner’s incompetence looks positively benign.