Little Ricky Takes On Obama-Rama

Well, it’s Thursday again, and you know what that means, don’t you, boys and girls?

Why, it’s “Elephant Poop In The Room” Day for the Philadelphia Inquirer!

And the Inky’s intrepid columnist, former PA Senator Rick “Man On Dog” Santorum, chastises Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama today because of Obama’s opposition to something approximating the “Born Alive Infants Protection Act” while Obama served in the Illinois Senate.

(The Born Alive Infants Protection Act, as you can read about here, was signed into law by President George W. Milhous Bush in August of 2002. Santorum was the author of the Senate version of the bill, with Congressman Charles T. Canady of Florida authoring the House version before the two were merged prior to Dubya scribbling onto it denoting his approval; strange that Santorum omits his ownership of this bill in his column today.)

Here’s more from Little Ricky…

Who would oppose a bill that said you couldn't kill a baby who was born? Not Kennedy, Boxer or Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even the hard-core National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Obama, however, is another story. The year after the Born Alive Infants Protection Act became federal law in 2002, identical language was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate (as previously noted). It was defeated with the committee's chairman, Obama, leading the opposition.

And…

The act simply prohibited the killing of a baby born alive. To address the concerns of pro-choice lawmakers, the bill included language that said nothing "shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand or contract any legal status or legal right" of the baby. In other words, the bill wasn't intruding on Roe v. Wade.

Really? Then why did the leader of Santorum’s party say the following when he approved it (as noted here)…

"This important legislation ensures that every infant born alive -- including an infant who survives an abortion procedure -- is considered a person under federal law," President George W. Bush said at the signing ceremony.

And there you have the reasoning that one day will be invoked in an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade once and for all, since an infant surviving an abortion has the legal protections of anyone else, despite Obama’s interpretation which I will note shortly.

Now please let me emphasize that I’m not oblivious to the emotional argument here. It’s inconceivable that another human being would want to do harm to a newborn child surviving an abortion and instead do everything possible to protect it.

But that really isn’t the point of this law, Santorum’s protestations notwithstanding. Every single thought or activity at any time originating from the anti-choicers is intended to do nothing else but destroy once and for all a woman’s right to choose. We should have no illusions about that now or ever.

And Obama recognized that when he explained his vote as follows (from the Jake Tapper link)…

Obama has said that had he been in the US Senate at that time, he would have voted for the federal "Born-Alive Infants Protection Act," despite his votes on a similar measure in the Illinois legislature in 2001 and 2002. Obama told the Chicago Tribune in 2004 the state measure "lacked the federal language clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade."

I’m not totally comfortable with the federal law here either as well as the Illinois law, but I give Obama credit for making the distinction between the two.

And Little Ricky, in typical fashion, states that Obama opposed the Illinois bill because he supported the right to end the lives of genetically imperfect children, a statement so repugnant that it really doesn’t even deserve a response.

And finally, once and for all (and I’ll probably have to clear this up this forever, like the “Casey Sr. not being allowed to speak at the ’92 Dem convention because he opposed abortion” and “Al Gore inventing the Internet” garbage), it should be noted that “partial birth abortion” is not a medical term, but a political one conceived to maximize the emotional impact of opposing a woman’s right to control her body, which has been grounded in settled law in this country since 1973.