With polls showing same-sex marriage not the hair-on-fire wedge issue it used to be, the GOP is cranking up the talking point that marriage is a state issue, not a federal one, and shouldn’t be an issue in the presidential campaign.

OK, geniuses, so what about the Defense of Marriage Act? Just last week, Republicans in the House voted to stop the Justice Department from using taxpayer funds to oppose DOMA.

And just last week, Romney Adviser Ed Gillespie said that Mittens supports a constitutional amendment that would strip states of the right to legalize same-sex marriage.

So which is it, righties? Hmmmmm?

Wingnuts do have a remarkable capacity for self-contradiction. See Frank Bruni:

I hesitated before picking on Bristol [Palin] because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.

But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.

She proves that they’re not going away anytime soon — a new generation rises! — and that they haven’t been daunted by the ridicule justly heaped on Newt Gingrich during the Republican primaries, when he dared to cast himself as a religious conservative.

Certainly Rush thunders on. Last week he bellowed that Obama had decided to “lead a war” on traditional marriage. Seems to me Limbaugh started those hostilities long ago, if not with his first divorce then certainly with his second and third.

However, Bruni says there are people in the “uppermost ranks” of the Republican Party who don’t want the campaign to be about social issues. That nobody in the “grass roots” listens to those people has escaped Bruni’s notice. But we’ll see in the next few days if Mittens is listening to the “uppermost ranks” and backs off same sex marriage.

In the past few days whenever reporters have asked a prominent Republican about same-sex marriage, their comeback line usually is something about creating jobs. I wish someone had asked John Boehner how many jobs bills House Republicans have passed, or even sponsored, since taking over the House in 2010. I believe the answer is “zero.”

Mittens still wants to campaign on his record as a proved master of business and as a jobs creator. The Obama campaign is ready for that, too.

On top of that, Mittens had a terrible record on jobs while he was governor of Massachusetts. Mississippi may have beat the Bay State then; I’d have to look.

Weirdly, the GOP also is trying to charge the President with being too chummy with Wall Street. He’s not socialist enough for them?

Many of us would agree that Obama has been way too soft on the financial sector, and that money from the financial sector speaks way too loudly in both parties. But it’s hard to paint the financial sector as inherently evil when your nominee-presumptive is going around making excuses for the recent JP Morgan meltdown and saying that financial sector regulation would just “hamper” investment. It was just investors, not taxpayers, who lost money with JP Morgan, Mittens said.

Speaking of hampering investments, the New York Times says that investors are getting sour on investing.

Investors are shunning the stock market, and who can blame them? As serial bubbles have burst, faith in the market has been rewarded with shattered retirements. At the same time, trust has been destroyed by scandals and — as demonstrated by the reckless trading at JPMorgan Chase — the slow, uncertain pace of financial reform.

There has been less buying and selling of stock, and there have been huge outflows of investor dollars from domestic stock mutual funds, as detailed recently by The Times’s Nathaniel Popper. If the trend continues, the result could be a less robust market, with fewer companies opting to raise money by issuing shares and fewer investors willing to put their retirement savings into stocks.

Policy makers should pay attention. Evidence suggests that investors are not merely reacting to tough conditions, but rather are staying away because they do not trust the market. Restoring trust is crucial to restoring the market.

We’ll see if restoring consistency is crucial to a political party.