BY HIS INTERESTS SHALL YOU KNOW HIM:

Exclusive: Obama's lost law review article (BEN SMITH & JEFFREY RESSNER, 8/22/08, Politico)

As president of the Harvard Law Review and a law professor in Chicago, Senator Barack Obama refined his legal thinking, but left a scant paper trail. His name doesn't appear on any legal scholarship.

But an unsigned — and previously unattributed — 1990 article unearthed by Politico offers a glimpse at Obama's views on abortion policy and the law during his student days, and provides a rare addition to his body of work.

The six-page summary, tucked into the third volume of the year's Harvard Law Review, considers the charged, if peripheral, question of whether fetuses should be able to file lawsuits against their mothers. Obama's answer, like most courts': No. [...]

Obama's tenure at the Review has been chronicled at length in the Politico, the New York Times, and elsewhere.

But Obama has never mentioned his law review piece, a demurral that's part of his campaign's broader pattern of rarely volunteering information or documents about the candidate, even when relatively innocuous. When Politico reporters working on a story about Obama's law review presidency earlier this year asked if he had written for the review, a spokesman responded accurately - but narrowly - that "as the president of the Law Review, Obama didn't write articles, he edited and reviewed them."

The case comment was published a month before he became president.

The notion that Obama hadn't written at all for the Review prompted skepticism.

"They probably don't want [to] have you [reporters] going back" to examine the Review, University of Southern California law professor (and Michael Dukakis campaign manager) Susan Estrich said at the time.

The Obama campaign swiftly confirmed Obama's authorship of the fetal rights article Thursday after a source told Politico he'd written it. The campaign also provided a statement on Harvard Law Review letterhead confirming that the unsigned piece was Obama's - the only record of the anonymous authors is kept in the office of the Review president - and that records showed it was the only piece he'd written for the Review.

Even as a student he was pimping for the Death Lobby?

MORE:
Why Obama Really Voted For Infanticide: More important to protect abortion doctors than “that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it.” (Andrew C. McCarthy, 8/22/08, National Review)

There wasn’t any question about what was happening. The abortions were going wrong. The babies weren’t cooperating. They wouldn’t die as planned. Or, as Illinois state senator Barack Obama so touchingly put it, there was “movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.”

No, Senator. They wouldn’t go along with the program. They wouldn’t just come out limp and dead.

They were coming out alive. Born alive. Babies. Vulnerable human beings Obama, in his detached pomposity, might otherwise include among “the least of my brothers.” But of course, an abortion extremist can’t very well be invoking Saint Matthew, can he? So, for Obama, the shunning of these least of our brothers and sisters — millions of them — is somehow not among America’s greatest moral failings.

No. In Obama’s hardball, hard-Left world, these least become “that fetus, or child — however you want to describe it.”

Most of us, of course, opt for “child,” particularly when the “it” is born and living and breathing and in need of our help. Particularly when the “it” is clinging not to guns or religion but to life.

But not Barack Obama. As an Illinois state senator, he voted to permit infanticide.

Obama: 110% Pro-Choice (George Neumayr, 8/22/2008, American Spectator)

Planned Parenthood and NARAL hail Barack Obama as "100 percent" pro-choice. But perhaps they should create a special new category for pols who go above and beyond the call of duty to vote for abortion rights even when they are not in legislative play.

Barack Obama would deserve a place of honor amongst these 110 percent pro-choicers, as he sees abortion rights threatened almost everywhere, including in anti-infanticide bills.

It has now been established that his opposition to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act rested on an excess of pro-choice zeal, as evident in the fact that 100 percent pro-choicers such as Hillary Clinton voted for the Senate bill. That's the sort of enthusiasm which should earn Obama the Margaret Sanger Award.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 22, 2008 6:31 AM