Obama and his femme-a-gogue flock aren’t fooling anyone. It’s not just evil men and right-wingers raising questions about the Democrats’ Equal Pay Day theater. Reporters bombarded Carney about a new American Enterprise Institute study that found that the salary for the median female White House staffer is 12 percent lower than for a male staffer. Carney meekly replied that at least the White House pay gap is not as bad as the national average.

Both the left-wing Daily Beast and the free-market Wall Street Journal opinion pages debunked the “77 cents on a dollar” myth, which inflates the gender gap by failing to account for education, occupation, and marital status. When challenged on the White House promotion of junk science, Carney sneered at a Reuters reporter that he “would expect something a little more precise.”

While Palmieri runs interference for Carney and Obama, the cloud of sexism charges hanging over the White House hasn’t gone away. It’s liberal media outlets including the New York Times and Time magazine that have noted the “boys’ club” climate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, epitomized by the glaring absence of women in featured Oval Office photos of Obama’s meetings with senior advisers. (Well, except for that one photo that showed a sliver of Valerie Jarrett’s leg.)