Friday, August 29, 2008

Obama's gives comprehensive answers but trips over his achilles heal.

While John McCain’s performance at the California Church was a definite disappointment the responses of Barach Obama revealed a comprehensive grasp of the dire predicament in which our country finds itself . In particular he excelled in his answers to the questions about evil and economic diversity while McCain was embarrassingly shallow on these these critical issues.

Obama’s achilles heal is the subject of abortion where his continued acceptance of money and support from the abortion industry lobbyists and PACs is totally contradictory to the positions he so elegantly discussed moments before. In this segment of the interview he seemed to excuse or even regret his denial of rights to babies born alive during an attempted abortion. He offered the excuse that the measure (In Illinois) did not contain a certain amendment.

Fortunate for us the business of the Illinois legislature is a matter of public record. The bill did contain the amendment he described. What is also in the record is his arguments against the bill. Essentially he argued that the lives of such children should not be protected because they would be an embarrassment to the abortionist. While he now says he would support such law an apology would have been more appropriate than the misleading and incorrect excuse he did offer. This glaring inconsistency with the rest of his answers was most disappointing.

Disappointing but not surprising. In his best seller, The Audacity of Hope, he made it clear in his story of his entry to politics that his funding came from the abortion lobby. He revealed this by saying that he could not accept funds from the human rights organization and PAC (lobby) to which I belong. This effectively signaled that he had bought into the conservative view that rights are not inherent to being human but granted by the powerful when and if they choose to do so.

Since the abortion issue is not the only right to life issue on our plate this year the evaluation of the leading candidates’ life values needs more analysis. At the moment it is clear to me that there is no truly pro life candidate being considered. Today (August 28) is the 45th anniversary of the "I have a dream" speech of Rev. Martin Luther King. He understood that the liberal ideal revealed in the founding documents was the dream that we all (or at least us liberals) seek. He quoted the pro life ideal, "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal." Human rights acrue to humans because they are human not because the powerful choose to grant them.

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