Playing dumb really has become an Olympic sport this week, especially among Obama-hating pundits who are busy doing their best to pretend it's outrageous that politicians sometimes engage in politics. No candidate has ever been offered anything in exchange for dropping his or her election hopes.

How do I know? Because people like Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ say so:

The White House's other mistake was thinking Washington pols would follow Chicago rules. It is one thing to make deals with the local ward boss, who knows his livelihood depends on keeping his mouth shut. It is another to make offers to a Pennsylvania congressman who is angry that you are fighting him in the primary, and who views the U.S. Senate as way cooler than an advisory board. Mr. Sestak viewed it in his interest to blab, and he did. And he won.

See, Obama's practicing Chicago style politics. He's imported it into the Beltway, which has never, ever seen anything like this before.

Except that, of course, it has.

Sen. S.I. Hayakawa on Wednesday spurned a Reagan administration suggestion that if he drops out of the crowded Republican Senate primary race in California, President Reagan would find him a job.

That was the AP, in 1981. Every journalists writing about the Joe Sestak/Andrew Romanoff story knows about the blatant quid pro quo offer that the Reagan White House made. (And every journalist understands those kinds of inter-party negotiations are a time-honored part of American politics.) But people like Strassel simply ignore the unpleasant fact that their GOP hero Reagan did exactly what Obama haters are charging this administration with doing.

Strassel knows about the Reagan incident and that it was documented in real time. So how does she handle it? How does she argue that Obama's politics are unprecedented, knowing that Reagan did something very similar? Easy, Strassel just pretends Reagan doesn't exist. Strassel doesn't admit or acknowledge the unpleasant Reagan job offer. That way she still has a clean of attack on Obama. (i.e. He's a monster!)

Is she being intellectually dishonest? Of course. Just like Andrew Malcolm was at the Los Angeles Times yesterday, and the way countless RNC pundits have been this week. Because apparently, GOP pundits would rather play very dumb (they'd rather pretend don't know who Ronald Reagan was) than engage in any kind of serious debate.