Last year in the run-up to the inauguration, Rick Warren got caught lying about his views on homosexuality, and also got caught in some incoherent babbling about hate speech in the bargain. So, when a bunch of bloggers (including Greta, Hemant, Andrew, and Ed, to list just the bloggers I read regularly) posted that Warren had lied about his past support for Prop 8, my main response was “oh, there he goes again. Doesn’t this man understand that we live in the 21st century and these things can’t be magic’d away?”

But, as I read Greta’s analysis, I got to wondering. What is the strategy that a rational huckster with Warren’s gig should adpot? Yeah, this story is all over the non-fundie blog world, but how many of the 20 million+ people who bought Warren’s book read non-fundie blogs? Or any half-serious form of news? Yeah, the current top two Google results for “Rick Warren proposition 8,” are Rick Warren disavows support for Prop. 8 and Rick Warren endorses Prop. 8. But who is that careful about these things to run that search? And those that do hear this are going to be hampered by the fact that that journalists feel ethically obligated to take Warren’s evasions and equivocations on these sorts of things seriously.

I think Greta is right that Warren is trying to work both sides of the street, and I’m betting he’ll get away with it for a long time to come. To some extent, his followers can’t be blamed: who wastes time with a Google search about yesterday’s news? You can whittle away your life with such things, and there’s something to be said for being informed only about things immediately relevant to your life while saying to hell with the rest. So, while the internet could spell the end of Warren’s brand of huckersterism, even in a world of ideally rational internet users perhaps he could survive.