Editor's note. I look forward to your comments at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

I'll be the first to admit I was surprised by the relatively timid response to our two-part analysis of pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama's bogus come-let-us-reason-together position on abortion.
(See http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/March08/nv031408.html  and http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/March08/nv031708.html).

It was as if even many pro-lifers couldn't believe that this nice young man could possibly be as unequivocally and unbendingly anti-life as pro-abortion Sen. Hillary Clinton. But Obama is, and is even more adroit at hiding his position, courtesy of a segment of the Abortion Establishment that worked hand in glove with him while he was an Illinois state Senator.

We've talked about this before. The Illinois chapter of Planned Parenthood gave Obama a pass. He could vote "present" on certain hot-hot button abortion issues, thus avoiding coming down squarely against life even in cases where a strong majority supported protection (According to pro-abortionists, Obama voted "present" on seven bills that "would have limited women's reproductive rights.")

We bring it up again today because of the ongoing in-house pro-abortion tussle over how Obama can be as  authentically, passionately pro-abortion as Clinton--which, in reality, is nothing more than another front in the battle between the Clinton and Obama campaigns, using abortion as a surrogate.

The latest wrinkle comes from a piece that ran yesterday on a pro-abortion site, Rh Reality check. According to blogger Dana Goldstein, Obama was--you guessed it--a victim of  "a conservative smear campaign against Obama's very real history of support for reproductive freedom"-- or would have been, had not PPFA given him a get-out-of-political-trouble-free card.

Goldstein is referring to Illinois' proposed "Born Alive Infant Protection Act" (BAIPA), which was very similar to the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act which President Bush signed into law in 2002.

But how can a measure intended merely to assure that babies who somehow manage to survive an abortion are not abandoned be a "conservative smear campaign"?

By, among other techniques, misleadingly turning the intent of BAIPA into a ban on partial-birth abortions. It was, of course, nothing of the sort. A "technique" that crushes skulls and vacuums out brains has a 100% kill ratio. Partial-birth abortion guarantees that there are no "born-alive" babies.

Rather BAIPA was intended for those instances in which abortionists used a drug to cause the cervix to dilate, after which a small preterm baby would drop out, sometimes alive.

Pro-life blogger and nurse Jill Stanek testified that such abortions sometimes were performed to kill babies who had Down syndrome or spina bifida, neither of which is itself usually a lethal condition.

"It is not uncommon for one of these live aborted babies to linger for an hour or two or even longer," she explained in her testimony. "One of them once lived for almost eight hours." Stanek said that some such babies were taken to a "soiled utility room" to die.

These are the babies whom Obama threw under the bus.

Goldstein further confused the discussion in many varied and interesting ways, the object of which is to turn Obama's callous and cold-bloodedly calculated behavior into a badge of honor.
"It is to Barack Obama's credit," Goldstein writes, "that, as an Illinois state senator, he voted against BAIPA twice, and then, as chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee in 2003, prevented it from advancing to the floor.

And it's not as though Obama had an epiphany when he became a United States Senator. As we have pointed out previously, in his brief stint in the Senate, Obama voted against a law that would have stopped the underhanded practice of taking a minor girl from a state with a parental notification law to one that doesn't in order to obtain a secret abortion.

Obama is also a co-sponsor of the newest edition of the Freedom of Choice Act, of which NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson has said, "In the interests of truth in advertising, the bill should be renamed the 'Freedom for Partial-Birth Abortionists Act.'" FOCA goes beyond even Roe v. Wade and would nullify virtually all federal and state limitations on abortion. Under the guise of "codifying Roe," pro-abortionists could pull off a legislative coup.

Smooth as silk, Sen. Obama speaks a language that rhetorically commits him to a search for common ground. And he has most certainly found common ground of a sort--with the most militant wing of the Abortion Establishment.

Please send your thoughts and comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.