(1)
First, Obama-the-candidate promises to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Then, the Obama administration files a brief supporting DOMA (see Matt’s powerful post about Obama’s wideranging and continuing betrayal of the GLBT community). A brief that John Aravosis describes as “despicable, and gratuitously homophobic”.

Then, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs insists that President Obama still wants and plans to overturn DOMA.

And now Obama-the-president — who is fond of declaring himself to be responsible and accountable for everything his administration does, at least when there is some political capital to be derived from doing so — blithely reiterates his “long-standing commitment” to overturn DOMA, and pledges “to work tirelessly” to that end. This happens at a White House ceremony to celebrate Obama extending some benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. The only problem: we’re looking at pretenses-within-pretenses. Federal employees already receive “some of the benefits that Obama will now officially offer.”

(2)
If you recognized the title of this post, give yourself a pat on the back and a gold star; you are hereby officially declared to be a Longtime Reader with an Incredible Memory.

In May 2006, I celebrated George Bush‘s baldfaced duplicity on the subject of WMDs by writing a post titled A Concise History Of WMD Pretenses. When you can take old premises like that and just dust them off and recycle them for Obama, that underscores just how little separates Obama-who-walks-on-water from Bush-who-destroyed-the-country.