Unbelievable Barack Obama

UPDATE below--firestorm on Illinois abortion record.***You may have noticed Barack Obama didn't mention his church of 20 years when he was over at Rick Warren's Saturday night. Even the left-leaning Salon could only do so much damage control after his flat performance.

You may also have noticed his evasive answer on abortion (did CNN edit out his gaffe?)[RCP using the full FoxNews clip now. CNN clip here. Maybe the youtuber edited it but one of my relatives hadn't heard the gaffe language on the CNN recap Sunday morning.]--trying out a new narrative. He misspoke that abortions have gone up under President Bush. Even the abortionists themselves concede it has dropped 25% since 1990, and is as low as it has been since 1974. Public support for restrictions on abortion is strong:

There’s a further irony in Obama’s scrambling to make a morally repellent position more palatable. Lost in all the spin about “common ground” is the bottom line reality that Americans already share common beliefs about abortion policy. A Gallup poll released this May found that while 50 percent of Americans describe themselves as “pro-choice,” a full 71 percent of Americans believe that abortion “should be legal only under certain circumstances,” or “illegal in all circumstances.”

Common-sense restrictions on abortion, like parental notification and spousal notification receive high levels of support. And this is the second reason the truth about the data on abortion reduction matters. There are policies that have been proven to reduce the abortion rate. For example, research from Michael New of the University of Alabama has demonstrated the effectiveness of parental-notification laws in reducing abortions. Nevertheless, it is precisely this kind of common ground, abortion reduction policy that Obama actually opposes.

He is lying about his own Illinois record on abortion. And after cold-bloodedly discussing the science...

Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral -- the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted.

...Sen. Obama claimed a determination of when life has human rights to be "above his pay grade". He couldn't have been talking about the Supremes, as he was only too happy to detail which judges he would not have appointed. (Deriding Justice Thomas as lacking experience was a bit much coming from the least experienced candidate for president in American history. Justice Thomas graduated from Yale Law School, had executive experience, and rose from genuine poverty, not as the offspring of two dilettante academics.)

So who's above the Chosen One's pay grade? The Supreme Being? (Gee, what would God do?) You mean Obama doesn't want to play god on abortion? That would be another flip-flop.

And unbelievable.

UPDATE: Obama's big lie on video.

UPDATE: Bill Kristol on the oh so cerebral Barack:

But, Obama added, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility” as we confront evil. Why? Because “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” After all, “just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.”

It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil? Hasn’t the overwhelming problem been, rather, a reluctance to effectively confront evil — in Darfur, or Rwanda, or pre-9/11 Afghanistan?

John McCain appears to think so.

Barack Obama--what good is he?

--crossposted at UNCoRRELATED