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It turns out MAL added the convenience API I'm looking for back in 2004, it just didn't get documented, and is hidden behind the "from _codecs import *" call in the codecs.py source code:
 http://hg.python.org/cpython-fullhistory/rev/8ea2cb1ec598
So, all the way from 2.4 to 2.7 you can write:
 from codecs import encode
 result = encode(data, "base64")
It works in 3.x as well, you just need to add the "_codec" to the end to account for the missing aliases:
>>> encode(b"example", "base64_codec")
b'ZXhhbXBsZQ==\n'
>>> decode(b"ZXhhbXBsZQ==\n", "base64_codec")
b'example'
Note that the convenience functions omit the extra checks that are part of the methods (although I admit the specific error here is rather quirky):
>>> b"ZXhhbXBsZQ==\n".decode("base64_codec")
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/encodings/base64_codec.py", line 20, in base64_decode
 return (base64.decodebytes(input), len(input))
 File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/base64.py", line 359, in decodebytes
 raise TypeError("expected bytes, not %s" % s.__class__.__name__)
TypeError: expected bytes, not memoryview
I'me going to create some additional issues, so this one can return to just being about restoring the missing aliases.