Despite his claim that his 60th birthday bonanza would be scaled back to “include only family and close friends,” Barack Obama, an infamous introvert and politician peerless in his disdain for beltway backslapping, went forward with a massive rager at his Martha’s Vineyard mansion. The former president ultimately lied not just about the guest list, which included hundreds of his closest friends, such as the recently canceled Chrissy Teigen and George Clooney, but also that it would be outdoors.

Obama’s bash shouldn’t have been a problem. As President Joe Biden’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky once noted, the coronavirus has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, meaning that hundreds of fully vaccinated people can party indoors with very little risk of contracting COVID-19 and a near-zero risk of being seriously sickened or killed by a rare breakthrough case. But because his successor’s CDC made an astonishing about-face in reinstituting the indoor mask mandate for the fully vaccinated, Obama tried to fit the narrative — or appear to, anyway.