Media demands answers from Obama about his gay marriage lie . . . just kidding!

Maybe it's because no one ever really believed him in the first place, but David Axelrod's acknowledgement that President Obama was always lying about his position on gay marriage has not exactly gotten a lot of attention from the media. It's not often that a president's own political guru tells the world that he blatantly lied in order to win an election, but maybe that's a thing of the past. Maybe we're in a new age when expectations of honesty from politicians - however naive such an expectation might be - are now seen as so quaint and adorable that strategists will frequently and quite openly come out and tell us when they instructed a candidate to lie to us for our own good.

Axelrod sure doesn't seem to think there's any longer a downside to doing so:

Barack Obama misled Americans for his own political benefit when he claimed in the 2008 election to oppose same sex marriage for religious reasons, his former political strategist David Axelrod writes in a new book, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics. “I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” Obama told Axelrod, after an event where he stated his opposition to same-sex marriage, according to the book. Axelrod writes that he knew Obama was in favor of same-sex marriages during the first presidential campaign, even as Obama publicly said he only supported civil unions, not full marriages. Axelrod also admits to counseling Obama to conceal that position for political reasons. “Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’ ” Axelrod writes.

Got that, black pastors? Obama's deception was aimed at you as much as anyone. Any instinct Obama might have had to level with you about his beliefs was laid aside out of deference to the "more pragmatic folks" who understand that you can't be honest with the folks in the black churches. It was too important to Obama that you turn out for him in big numbers, and if you knew what he really believed, you might not have given him what he needed from you. Makes you feel great about supporting him, yes? That's why we ended up listening to him making labored pronouncements like this one:

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For a guy who claims not to be good at bullshitting, there's an awful lot of it in this one short clip. For one thing, to claim he sees marriage as sacred "as a Christian" because, er, um, well . . . "God's in the mix," well, I really wanted to hear him expound on that one and I was disappointed that Rick Warren let him off the hook by interrupting him with another question. Then he says he wouldn't support a constitutional amendment on the issue because it's a matter of state law, which is hilarious in retrospect since he's now happy to support all kinds of federal intervention to overturn state laws that still define marriage according to the way he claimed to see it in 2008. But what difference does it make to flyspeck it in retrospect when his own campaign chief has already told us the whole thing was a big lie? And why won't the media ask him about it? Two reasons. 1. They already know the answer. He lied to fool people like black pastors into getting out the vote for him. 2. They don't see anything wrong with it. They think it's the job of black pastors to support Democrats and not to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, so if they stubbornly insist on doing the latter at the expense of the former, then they deserve to be lied to. Besides, how are the media going to find time to question the president about lying to you when they're busy doing it themselves?