Thu 24 Jul 2008
Hard to imagine McCain making a false claim like this. If he did the press would be all over it for weeks.
From Powerline:
Campaigning in Israel yesterday, Obama held a press conference in Sderot. There he claimed membership on the Senate Banking Committee that passed the Dodd-Shelby Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2008. The Senate Banking Committe passed the bill out of committee last week by a vote of 19-2. Obama stated:
Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.
…However, Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Obama claimed membership on the committee so that he could count the committee’s action as one of “my deeds.”The bill passed out of the Senate Banking Committee appears to derive in part from other Senate bills (S.3227 and S.970) with which Obama had essentially nothing to do. Last week Obama issued a press release applauding the Senate Banking Committee’s passage of the sanctions act, “which includes provisions Obama offered last year in the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act of 2007 (S. 1430).” Whatever sanctions on Iran Obama supported in 2007, however, apparently did not constitute saber rattling of the kind that Obama imputed to Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the Democratic primaries.
Barack Obama has proved himself an extraordinarily cynical politician. He doesn’t believe in much, but he certainly believes in his own power to make voters believe whatever he says, even when what he says today contradicts what he said yesterday, and even when it constitutes a bald fiction, such as his claim that the Senate Banking Committee is “[his] committee.”
Some day it may begin to dawn on attentive observers that Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist. Obama is an overaged example of the phenomenon, but his skills in the art have brought him great success and he’s not giving it up now.