title: Strange date parsing results in Python
body: <p>I'm using the <a href="https://dateutil.readthedocs.org" rel="nofollow">dateutil</a> library to parse some date strings, and getting weird results. I assumed the following date strings would all be equal, and that the timezone abbreviation in parenthesis was actually optional, but dropping it gets me a completely different value:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import datetime   
  import dateutil.parser
  
  parsed_d1 = dateutil.parser.parse('Sun May 13 2012 00:00:00 GMT-0400 (EDT)')   
  parsed_d2 = dateutil.parser.parse('Sun May 13 2012 00:00:00 GMT-0400')   
  parsed_d3 = dateutil.parser.parse('Sun May 13 2012 00:00:00-0400')   
  
  print str(parsed_d1)   
  print str(parsed_d2)   
  print str(parsed_d3) 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Output:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>2012-05-13 00:00:00-04:00   
  2012-05-13 00:00:00+04:00   
  2012-05-13 00:00:00-04:00  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Can anyone explain what's going on here?</p>