Along with the Washington Post item Seth mentions below, the New York Times also has a “Check Point” piece on Obama and the Born-Alive controversy this morning. It tries in every imaginable way to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and to accept or excuse every one of the contradictory stories the Obama campaign offers to explain his inexplicable vote, but it still cannot avoid the simple fact that, as the article puts it, “The statute Congress passed in 2002 and the one the Illinois committee rejected a year later are virtually identical.” Indeed, they do not differ in substance at all.

The excuse the Times pushes most forcefully is the absurd notion that because around the same time as the Born-Alive bill the legislature was also considering another bill that would have allowed children who survive abortions to also sue for damages, and because Obama and other abortion rights advocates didn’t think damages should be allowed, it makes sense that Obama would have voted against both bills. That’s simply nonsense. These were two separate bills, Obama voted on them separately, and he voted against not only the one that involved damage claims but also the one that did exactly the same thing in exactly the same way as a bill that had already passed unanimously at the federal level, and that he has since claimed he would have supported.

This new excuse is surely the lamest one yet, although the one offered to the Post (that things were different because this was a state bill, and state laws on abortion actually matter) does have the added advantage of explicitly contradicting Obama’s past statement (noted by the Times) that he would have voted for the federal bill if one just like it had been proposed at the state level. The latest twist in the campaign’s explanations suggest he actually wouldn’t have. And of course, the facts demonstrate that he didn’t.