You can tell Barack Obama knows he has a problem when he starts lying about his record, and the lie is readily disprovable. Such is the case with his 2002 vote against the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act (covered today by Kyle-Anne Shiver's AT article,  and by Ed Lasky's AT article last week). A nearly identical federal bill passed the Senate unanimously, supported even by the likes of Barbara Boxer.

What made the federal bill so much better, he explained, was its inclusion of an additional clause that expressly (and redundantly) stated the law would have zero effect whatsoever on abortion policy or the legal status of the unborn. This language convinced the Senate's most reliable pro-abortion members to support the measure unanimously. Even NARAL gave it the green light, and Obama claimed he would have, too. [....]

Setting aside the meaninglessness of Obama's distinction between the state and federal bills, he seemed to believe this explanation would satisfy voters' concerns about the issue. The media swallowed his story without skepticism, thus discarding Obama's potential political problem in the proverbial linen closet. But truth has resilient streak, and years later, Obama's tale is unraveling.

The National Right to Life Committee last week uncovered documents proving that Obama's "I-totally-would've-supported-the-Senate-bill-because-I'm-a-moderate!" clarification is an outright falsehood. According to NRLC spokesman Douglas Johnson, the records "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."

Barack Obama's stood by his lie that he did not vote against an identical bill as IL state senator to the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act when responding to that pointed question to CBN's David Brody last night after the Saddleback Showdown :

"DP#1" means "Do Pass Amendment #1." "DPA" means "Do Pass as Amended."

Here is the original bill. Here is Amendment #1. Here is the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

Obama first voted in favor of Amendment #1 and then voted against the Born Alive bill as amended. It couldn't be more clear. Furthermore, here is the Republican Senate Staff Analysis from that day, expressing the same understanding of the chain of events:

Americans must ask themselves why Barack Obama really opposed this legislation. It's already been established that his standard explanation isn't the truth, so what's the genuine reason? One possible answer is that Obama's commitment to legalized abortion runs so deep that he believes the Constitution guarantees that "right," even if the initial abortion procedure fails. Put crudely, once a woman chooses to abort, she's entitled to a dead baby. That position is so far out of the mainstream, it's no wonder Obama may have decided to use misdirection and deception to explain away his vote.

Another possibility is that Obama's a hyper-partisan ideologue. The driving forces behind the Born Alive Infant Protection Act were pro-life groups that generally support Republicans. Perhaps Obama's fierce partisanship and leftist ideology were simply too strong for him to stomach handing any conservative group a political victory.