O-bortions, Dishonesty & A Very Tangled Web

Obama is giving truth to the old saying, "what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decive." At issue is how deceptive Obama is being in attempting to hide and neutralize his prior radical stance on abortion. Obama is being caught in lie after lie about his prior adoption of a position that crosses the line from abortion to infanticide. The evidence that he is being dishonest is so clear and the position he took so radical that this could and should turn out to be a major issue in the campaign.
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When a child is born alive from a botched abortion, should it be treated legally as a human entitled to care and life saving medical treatment? Or should it be be killed outside the womb, either by direct act of the physician or by the physician's inaction - i.e., simply abandoning the live child to perish with no care? That is infanticide and those who say yes to the latter occupy the very radical fringe of abortion rights activists.

The question is whether Obama supported that radical position. The answer is unarguably yes. Over the past days, we've been treated to an ever changing series of statements from Obama in an effort to disown his prior position or, at a minimimum, to neutralize it. But that just became impossible with the release of Obama's statements on tape and the publication of the minutes of the Illinois Senate in which Obama argued against a bill that would have required treating children born alive from botched abortions as human.

To appreciate both how radical Obama's position was on abortion and how unarguably deceptive and dishonest he has now become about his prior position, let me give a short history of what is occurring. On the eve of the Saddleback interview last week, Obama said that people who were claiming he had supported the radical position of infanticide were lying. Here is the interview:



The background to his started in about 2000 when Jill Stanek, a nurse at Christ Hospital in Chicago, discovered that some of the abortions being conducted there resulted in the birth of live infants. The doctors who performed the abortions were simply discarding the infants, allowing them to perish from neglect and exposure. She publicized her observations and turned this into a cause celebre.

Congress acted. With the full and bipartisan support of abortion opponents and staunch supporters of abortion alike, Congress passed a law directly aimed at this practice by providing that such children born alive from botched abortions were to be considered human. As such, these children were entitled to care and treatment. The law was crafted very narrowly to apply only to live children fully expelled from the mother's body and with "neutrality" language so as to not otherwise restrict abortions - even partial birth abortions where the live child is killed while partially outside the vagina.

States had to decide whether to also pass such a law to address infanticide in their states. The bill came before the Illinois Senate in all practical terms in the same form as the federal law. Doug Ross posts a copy of both the federal and state bill as well as the roll call for the vote on the bill in the Illinois Senate. Obama voted against the bill.

Subsequent to Obama's lie shown in the video above, when confronted with proof of his vote, the Obama campaign admitted that Obama had in fact voted against the bill. This came with a caveat. Initially that caveat was that he voted against the Illinois bill because it did not contain "neutrality" language that would otherwise leave the right to an abortion unaffected.

We learned the next day that Obama was lying again. Obama, as a state senator, was in charge of the committee that oversaw their state legislation on this issue and, in fact, voted to include the "neutrality" clause in the Illinois bill preserving all rights to an abortion other than in this narrow category of infanticide. It was after the neutrality clause was inserted that Obama had voted against the bill.

Obama's excuse then changed again. His newly articulated justification for his vote against this legislation was because the anti-infanticide bill was part of a package of legislation and that he did not agree with the entire package.

I do not know whether in fact this anti-infanticide legislation was part of a larger package. As the facts below show, it does not matter.

Obama's latest in a string of serial lies falls by the wayside today with transcripts and tapes of Obama arguing explicitly against this bill to halt infanticide. He does so on the merits, wholly without reference to any other legislation to which this bill was attached. Here is the audio, compliments of Gateway Pundit, of Obama arguing against the provisions of the bill on the grounds that it might effect a woman's decision (not her right) to have an abortion:



I was going to analyze this, but Hot Air does so with exceptional clarity, adding in the more detailed transcript of Obama's argument against this bill in the Illinois Senate:

. . . On pages 32-34 of the April 4, 2002 session, Obama debates the bill on the floor of the state Senate. He says essentially the exact same thing as he did in this audio passage above, but with a little more detail:

[T]he only plausible rationale, to my mind, for this legislation would be if you had a suspicion that a doctor, the attending physician, who has made the assessment that this is a nonviable fetus and that, let’s say for the purposes of the mother’s health, is being — that — that labor is being induced, that that physician (a) is going to make the wrong assessment and (b) if the physician discovered, after the labor had been induced, that, in fact, he made an error, and in fact this was not a nonviable fetus but, in fact, a live child, that the physician, of his own accord or her own accord, would not try to exercise the sort of medical procedures and practices that would be involved in saving that child.

Now, if — if you think that there are possibilities that doctors would not do that, then maybe this bill makes sense, but I — I suspect and my impression is, is that the Medical Society suspects that doctors feel that they would already be under that obligation, that they would already be making these determinations, and that essentially adding a — an additional doctor who the has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.

Now, if that’s the case –and — and I know some of us feel very strongly one way or the other on that issue — that’s fine, but I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if these children are being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure they’re looked after.

This passage is really remarkable for the willfully obtuse nature of Obama’s arguments. By the time this debate took place, Jill Stanek had already revealed that doctors weren’t providing medical care to infants born alive during abortions, at Christ Hospital, and a subsequent investigation proved that other abortion providers also abandoned such infants to die. That was the entire reason for the debate. Obama acts as if this is some curious academic hypothesis.

Instead of addressing the actual issue of infanticide, Obama twists it into a protection for abortion. He frames his own hypothetical as an abortion “for the health of the mother”, but the circumstances of the mother’s health has no bearing at all on whether a live infant should receive medical care. How would treating a live infant threaten the health of the mother?

And finally, as the original audio notes, the remainder of Obama’s opposition rests on the “burden” of calling in a second physician to make an independent determination of the birth. The bill created that “burden”, a procedure which would take very little time at all, precisely because the doctors at Christ Hospital and elsewhere threw live infants away with no oversight at all.

Nowhere in this argument does Obama say, “I oppose this bill because of its companion bill,” the lame argument that has surfaced over the last 48 hours from Team Obama. He doesn’t talk about the bill’s supposed unconstitutionality. Moreover, during the presidential campaign, he said he would have supported the federal bill even though it had all of the same supposed flaws Obama argued against in this passage.

Obama protected infanticide in order to protect abortion on demand. There simply is no other explanation except abject stupidity, and this passage proves it.

This is one lie that has caught up with Obama. This is simply too well documented for him to disown. Whether this will be publicized and be reflected in voter's assessments of his character and judgment is an open question. That it should is, I believe, beyond doubt.

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Testing A Theory Of Truth Detection

I thought this theory was a bit ridiculous when I read it - until I put it to the Clinton test. The theory comes from recent study, reported in the Telegraph, that found that people blink much more rapidly after telling a lie. This from the Telegraph:

Liars blink less frequently than normal during the lie, and then speed up to around eight times faster than usual afterwards.

The findings, reported in the Journal of Non-verbal Behaviour, means that blink rates could soon be used by professionals, such as the police and security forces, to tell when someone is being duplicitous.

Dr Sharon Leal, co-author of the study at Portsmouth University, said: "It is striking what different patterns in eye blinks emerged for liars and truth tellers.

"Such striking differences in behaviour between liars and truth tellers are rarely seen in deception research."

. . . Results show that when the questions were being asked and the answers given, the blink rate in the liars went down. In contrast the truthful group's rate went up, though this could have been down to test anxiety.

Afterwards, the blink rate of the liars increased rapidly, while that of the truth tellers remained the same.

Researchers believe the increased effort involved in telling fibs could be the reason why liars do not blink during the act of lying.

Dr Leal said: "Liars must need to make up their stories and must monitor their fabrication so that they are plausible and adhere to everything the observer knows or might find out.

"In addition, liars must remember their earlier statements, so that they appear consistent when re-telling their story, and know what they told to whom. Liars will be more inclined than truth tellers to monitor and control their demeanour so they will appear honest.

"The reasons why there is a flurry of blinks after the lie is not really clear. It may be that this flurry is a kind of safety valve, like a release of energy after the tension of lying."

Now with that in mind, take a look at probably the most famous lie of the last two decades in American politics, Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" speech. The speech comes in the last 40 seconds of the video below, but it pays to watch a lot of the lead up to get a feel for Clinton's normal blink pattern. He blinks fairly rarely. When he starts into his lie, his eyes stay open for a bit, but then he begins blinking with much greater rapidity as he continues with the lie.



Obama I am unsure of. He either has a naturally fast blink pattern or he is lying his veritable ass off in this response wherein he says that people are lying about his record on abortion.



Your call.

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Denial or Dissimulation?

Charles Krauthammer believes that our Democrats are in a “state of denial” about Iraq. The Democrats, a year ago, justified their embrace of defeat on the meme that our soldiers in Iraq were in a “civil war” that “could not be won militarily.” Now that Iraq is well on its way to being pacified following the posting of a new U.S. commander with a different strategy, the Democrats are searching for any excuse to add a patina of legitimacy to their continued attempts to legislate defeat in Iraq.

For Mr. Krauthammer to call that a "state of denial" suggests the Dems are using a psychological defense mechanism that prevents them from recognizing reality. Mr. Krauthammer is being far too tactful, suggesting an excuse for what is clearly conscious perfidy.

The Democrats, a year ago, saw an opportunity for partisan gain by exploiting problems in Iraq and they jumped on it without any regard to the long term costs to America. Now they are trapped in their total embrace of defeat, hoping to be saved by bad news out of Iraq before they have to provide funding for the war again. It is all a coldly calculated decision by intelligent and ambitious but unprincipled people. They are not in a state of denial. They are trapped in a corner and know that they will face the wrath of the electorate if they concede to success in Iraq. They are consciously dissimulating in an effort to find some means of escape. Their stranglehold on the concept of the formal “top down” benchmarks to justify surrender and their utter refusal to acknowledge the “bottom up” grassroots progress clearly occurring in Iraq and now reported by even the NYT is incredibly transparent dissimulation.

This today from Mr. Krauthammer:

It does not have the drama of the Inchon landing or the sweep of the Union comeback in the summer of 1864. But the turnabout of American fortunes in Iraq over the past several months is of equal moment -- a war seemingly lost, now winnable. The violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. Political allegiances have been radically reversed. The revival of ordinary life in many cities is palpable. Something important is happening.

And what is the reaction of the war critics? Nancy Pelosi stoutly maintains her state of denial, saying this about the war just two weeks ago: "This is not working. . . . We must reverse it." A euphemism for "abandon the field," which is what every Democratic presidential candidate is promising, with variations only in how precipitous to make the retreat.

How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks -- mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government -- that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation.

. . . But does the absence of this deus ex machina invalidate our hard-won gains? Why does this mean that we cannot achieve success by other means?

Sure, there is no oil law. But the central government is nonetheless distributing oil revenue to the provinces, where the funds are being used for reconstruction.

Sure, the de-Baathification law has not been modified. But the whole purpose of modification was to entice Sunni insurgents to give up the insurgency and join the new order. This is already happening on a widening scale all over the country in the absence of a relaxed de-Baathification law.

. . . Why is top-down national reconciliation as yet unattainable? Because decades of Saddam Hussein's totalitarianism followed by the brutality of the post-invasion insurgency destroyed much of Iraq's political infrastructure, causing Iraqis to revert to the most basic political attachment -- tribe and locality. Gen. David Petraeus’s genius has been to adapt American strategy to capitalize on that development, encouraging the emergence of and allying ourselves with tribal and provincial leaders -- without waiting for cosmic national deliverance from the newly constructed and still dysfunctional constitutional apparatus in Baghdad.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is in disarray, the Sunni insurgency in decline, the Shiite militias quiescent, the capital city reviving. Are we now to reverse course and abandon all this because parliament cannot ratify the reconciliation already occurring on the ground?

. . . So, just as we have learned this hard lesson of the disconnect between political benchmarks and real stability [following elections and then the Samarra bombing], the critics now claim the reverse -- that benchmarks are what really count.

This is to fundamentally mistake ends and means. The benchmarks would be a wonderful shortcut to success in Iraq. But it is folly to abandon the pursuit of that success when a different route, more arduous but still doable, is at hand and demonstrably working.

Read the article here. Mr. Krauthammer describes realistically what is now obvious in Iraq. He does not do so as regards what is equally obvious in Washington. This is emblematic of the problem conservatives seem to have in responding truthfully and with appropriate disdain and volume to the partisan, conscious and traitorous acts of today's Democrats. To call what the Democrats are doing today anything else requires, as Senator Clinton put it, a "willing suspension of disbelief." And do remember the context of her remarks. She was attacking General Petraeus over his reports of success in pacifying Iraq.

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