What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Make a script containing this code:

 parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
 parser.add_argument('-i', '--input-base-directory',
                     type=argparse.FileType('r'),
                     default='/home')
 parser.parse_args()

2. Run the script with '-h'.
3. See it complain that '/home' is a directory

Detailed explanation:
With '-h', we just need to print the help message. We shouldn't fail on a default value that's wrong or else the help message will not get printed and the user will have no idea what the problem is. This is a valid use case as I want to provide a default location, but I can't guarantee that the location works on the user's machine. I end up doing my own checking.

I’d argue this is a behavior bug that could be fixed in 2.7 and 3.2 too, but Steven will decide.

Sounds like a but to me, too.

I think http://bugs.python.org/issue12776, which delays type conversions on defaults should solve this problem, right? If you agree, could you add your code here as a test case to that issue and mark this as duplicate?

(And yes, I agree this is a bug.)

Added test case

Seems to be duplicate of http://bugs.python.org/issue12776