“I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” Obama reportedly told Axelrod back in 2008, after he lied about gay marriage.
  • Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com
  • “I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” Obama reportedly told Axelrod back in 2008, after he lied about gay marriage.

Here's a fact that will probably upset some of you: politicians lie. As Dan told you this morning, the Atlantic says that in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was just pretending to be against gay marriage. He actually supported gay marriage from the start, but he had to claim to be for civil unions and then slowly "evolve" to "accept" gay marriage over the course of his presidency. This allegation comes from Obama adviser David Axelrod in his new memoir, The Believer—Axelrod even admits to being one of the people who convinced Obama to lie about his gay marriage stance. Now that gay marriage is legal in the majority of the United States, it's easy to second-guess this decision, but in 2008, when approval of gay marriage was a lot lower, it would've been a hard sell. Obama told a convenient lie, and presumably at the same time he was planning to do everything he could to advance the cause of gay marriage when he was in office. (Personally, I think he feels the same way about marijuana legalization and a host of other issues, too.) I bring this up to demonstrate the thousands of convenient lies that go into a political campaign, and I use Obama's example to illustrate what I believe is going on with Ethan Czahor, Jeb Bush's new chief technology officer. Only instead of concealing a liberal agenda from the American people, I think Czahor is trying to gloss over a history of misogyny and homophobia.

Yesterday, BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski noticed that Czahor's Twitter feed was losing tweets at a remarkable rate. More than 40 tweets were deleted from Czahor's timeline after the news broke that Bush had hired him. Czahor finally addressed the deleted tweets:


Uh-huh. To me, this sounds like President Obama's "evolving" line. What is Czahor suddenly ashamed of? Well, according to his Twitter feed, he thinks a whole lot of women are "sluts." In 2009, Czahor wrote (all tweet quotes are [sic]) "new study confirms old belief: college female art majors are sluts, science majors are also sluts but uglier," and "most people don't know that 'halloween' is German for 'night that girls with low self-esteem dress like sluts.'"

Czahor also likes to brag about objectifying women. In 2010, he wrote, "i know lindsey lohan is supposed to die soon, but i'd sure like to sleep with her before that happens." In 2011, he wrote, "today i spotted a chick carrying a book, and i checked out the title of the book before i checked out her. what's happening to me?"

But Czahor seems to experience panic when he believes he's being objectified in the same way he objectifies women. In 2011, he wrote "the golds gym in san francisco has a wide selection of free weights, machines, and men who undress you with their eyes while you work out." Another time, he tweeted, "when i burp in the gym i feel like it's my way of saying, 'sorry guys, but i'm not gay.'" (I'm sure the entire gay male population of San Francisco accepts his apology.)

The Bush campaign told BuzzFeed that “Governor Bush believes the comments were inappropriate,” and says the tweets “have been deleted at our request." Which is at odds with Czahor's tweet that he deleted the posts simply because he doesn't find them "funny" or "appropriate" anymore. More realistically, the Bush campaign doesn't give a shit what terrible beliefs Czahor holds about women or gay people so long as he doesn't broadcast them openly to the world. The fact that the Bush campaign has chosen and defended Czahor signifies that this isn't the new Republican campaign Bush wants us to believe it is. It's just the same old Republican bullshit—anti-woman, antigay—wrapped up in a shiny new tech-friendly package.