Obama - "Who are You Going to Believe? Me, Or Your Own Lying Eyes?"

Someone is lying.

Katherine Jean Lopez of The Corner points to a post forum interview last night, where Barack Obama pointedly "clarified" his vote on the "Born Alive Infant Protection Act". From the transcript:

Brody: Real quick, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I gotta tell you that's the one thing I get a lot of emails about and it's just not just from Evangelicals, it about Catholics, Protestants, main -- they're trying to understand it because there was some literature put out by the National Right to Life Committee. And they're basically saying they felt like you misrepresented your position on that bill.

Obama: Let me clarify this right now.

Brody: Because it's getting a lot of play.

Obama: Well and because they have not been telling the truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported - which was to say --that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born - even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level.

The NRLC says otherwise. NRLC spokesman Douglas Johnson:

"Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an Illinois state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion -- even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion. Obama's legislative actions in 2003 -- denying effective protection even to babies born alive during abortions -- were contrary to the position taken on the same language by even the most liberal members of Congress. The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose."

A side by side comparison of the state and federal bills can be found here.

The funny thing is, Obama voted in committee in favor of the "neutrality clause" that the federal bill had that the state bill was lacking, and then led the committee to kill the amended bill 6-4 so that it would never see the light of day. Shades of John Kerry's "I voted for it, before I voted against it!"

The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the "neutrality clause" (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision. Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.

So, you have the copiously footnoted and documented claims of the National Right to Life Committee against the bald faced assertion of a neophyte politician running for office. Someone is lying.

Or perhaps, lying twice, when he lies about other people lying?

Cross Posted at Say Anything