Read the rest at PJ Media.

American business has become a polish joke. “How many UAW employees does it take to install a headlamp? Four.” “How many Teamsters does it take to hammer in a nail? Five.”

The problem is that when three, four and five people are “needed” to do the simplist tasks — each of them earning approximately seventy-five dollars an hour in direct salary plus every perk the union can extract from management — someone has to pay for it.

This is the same mentality that saw Fannie Mae collapse. It’s the same mentality that has destroyed our public schools. It’s the mentality of entitlement where everyone gets a job and everyone gets a high salary and everyone gets maternaity leave (even fathers!) and everyone gets time-and-a-half and by the time everyone is given everything no one can afford the product any longer.

Part 2, below.

Written by Evan Sayet
Sunday, May 22, 2005

Sandy Berger is caught cramming top-secret intelligence documents down the front of his pants. Dan Rather is caught using forged documents to try to influence a presidential election.

John Kerry slanders a million of his “band of brothers” in bogus testimony before Congress and then continues to lie for the next 30 years, claiming that in 1968 he was sent by Richard Nixon (who wasn’t president yet) to Cambodia on Christmas Eve (which never happened), hearing the Vietnamese “sing Christmas carols” (the Vietnamese are Buddhists and don’t celebrate Christmas) and being fired upon by the Khmer Rouge (which didn’t become a military force until a half decade later).

Howard Dean attempts to spread outrageous lies about President Bush about the events of 9/11, only admitting – after being caught in his dissembling – that he never believed the lies himself.  Al Sharpton makes his name by helping to fake the rape of a young child. Ted Kennedy clings to his family name after leaving his “female companion” to drown while he swims to shore to sober up before calling the police.

And Bill Clinton – well, he “never had sex with that woman!”

Al Gore recognizes that if he is going to be of any future relevance, he must join the parade of liars.  He quickly reinvents himself by morphing from a quiet, thoughtful policy wonk to a demagogue spewing the anti-American venom and propaganda that has become the coin of the realm in today’s Democratic Party.

The leadership of the Democratic Party gives a standing ovation to Michael Moore’s fake documentary, which they know to be nothing more than a lie-filled, hate-filled, anti-American propaganda piece.  And Ward Churchill’s lies not only gain him tenured employment but elevate him to department head at the University of Colorado.

These are not odd zealots but the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party.  From its most recent standard bearer to the newly-minted head of the DNC, to its leading voices in “civil rights” issues, to its top foreign policy advisors, to its House and Senate leadership and beyond, lying has become the party’s defining trait, while the few Democrats too decent to lie – the Joe Liebermans and Dick Gephardts, for example – find themselves with less support among the party faithful than did Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.

It is dificult to take seriously charges that Republicans are “liars” when that accusation is leveled in books like Al Franken’s “Lying Liars and the Lying Lies They Tell.” After all, how much credence can be given Franken when he had to testify in a court of law – to save himself from a mountain of libel suits – that his book was never intended to be taken seriously?  The court agreed that no reasonable person could read “Lying Liars” and think it factual and thus the book was published as a fictional joke book.

So why do Democrats lie?  Well, for one thing, they have to. Democrats recognize that the vast majority of the American people reject their basic philosophy – as they did resoundingly in the last presidential and congressional elections – which says that all domestic problems can be solved with forced confiscation and redistribution of income, all social issues can be resolved by more and more government control over the citizenry, and all international questions can be answered by ceding American sovereignty to corrupt foreign powers like France and corrupt organizations like the United Nations.

Further they have to lie because their track record is one of utter failure.  The Democrats had 40 years of uninterrupted social experimentation that yielded little-to-nothing that enhanced our democracy, either domestically or in terms of foreign affairs.  Just like the failing regimes of socialist Europe and the failed regime of communist Russia, Democrats cannot point to a single time when leftism – including their own – hasn’t brought despair.

After decades of Democrat-driven “affirmative action,” “new math,” and “multicultural” experiments, blacks are still disproportionately members of an underclass and our schools (unlike those of the past that created “The Greatest Generation”) are now so dysfunctional that we have to outsource the simplest jobs to countries like India.  Forty years of leftism has left America more divided, not less divided, as the left pursues its agenda of replacing a “melting pot” that worked with a “mosaic” of multiculturalism, multilingualism, and America bashing that clearly doesn’t.

These are the tactical reasons that make Democrats lie.  Leftists are also liars for philosophical reasons and because, I believe, of psychological aberrations.  In the words of former feminist leader Tammy Bruce, leftwing Democrats are “malignant narcissists.”  In their arrogance, modern liberals believe in nothing greater than themselves and that whatever they say – anything that advances their agenda – must be “the truth.”

The flipside of this coin is that they believe that anyone who disagrees with them must be – can only be – stupid or liars or racists. In their self-serving, self-aggrandizing minds, they justify their lies in the name of doing the rest of us a favor, the better to get us to do what they believe is the “right” thing.

Believing in nothing but self doesn’t just mean rejecting the obvious higher callings of God, freedom, family, and country, but even the smaller things that good people once respected and honored are rejected by today’s Democrats.

In times past, a journalist might have had the same ideological bent as a Dan Rather, but his respect for his profession – what they used to call “journalistic integrity” – kept him from being an out-and-out liar.  In the old days, Hollywood’s love for the movies compelled them to award the best picture Oscar to what was really the best picture. Today, without regard to the quality of the film, the award is given to any movie that advances the leftists’ agenda.  This year it was the pro-euthanasia “Million Dollar Baby,” in contention with a pro-abortion film and one that touted the work of that known pervert Alfred Kinsey.

In another age, a museum curator placed beauty ahead of personal ideology and thus filled the halls of great museums with exceptional works based on their aesthetic value.  Today’s “artists” do not believe in beauty and thus seeks only to advance their anti-God agenda by filling the space with crosses drenched in urine and pictures of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung.

Democrats lie because, with nothing bigger than themselves to believe in – not God, not country, not democracy, not art, not facts, not history, not freedom – they believe they themselves to be gods, and thus their beliefs become their own “gospel truth.”  Which is no truth at all!

~~~~~~

About the Writer: About the Writer: Evan Sayet is a writer, speaker and pundit in Los Angeles and former Communications Director for L.A. for President Bush. Prior to his full-time move into the conservative thought industry, he was a TV and movie writer with credits ranging from “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher” to the cult classic “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and the Discovery Channel documentary “The 70′s: When Decades Attack.” He is currently working on a book: “Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals `Think’” and his “Right to Laugh” night of conservative comedy is touring nationally in 2006. He can be reached via his website at http://www.evansayet.com.

The left, seeing all judgment as prejudice (since anything you believe is tainted by your own circumstances such as skin color, nation of birth, religion — or lack thereof — economic status, etc) believe the only way to eliminate the evils of bigotry is to never think at all. To the Modern Liberal, rational and moral thought is believed to be a hate crime. To them, “discriminating thought” is the evil of having discriminated. The Right, on the other hand, believes that discriminating and moral thought is, while clearly flawed, utterly essential and, in fact, the only way to make a better world.

This leads the Left and the Right to very different places with regard to policy. Because of these diametrically opposed visions, the Right seeks to help people live better lives by encouraging them to engage in the better behaviors. The Left — rejecting the discriminating thought required to RECOGNIZE the better behaviors — does not create policy designed to promote these better behaviors and, in fact, seeing the recognition of the better as acts of bigotry, actually works to promote the lesser behaviors which they see as “under seige” from the bigots.

At this point, when their work to undermine the promotion of the better behaviors — and, their efforts to rehabilitate the image of the lesser behaviors — lead as they have and must to greater suffering and failure, the Democrat THEN steps in with policy designed for no other purpose than to help mitigate the consequenes of the behaviors that they themselves have made prevelant.

On the institutional level, one sees the institutions of the Right — from the Church to the Boy Scouts — promote better lives by working to encourage people to better themselves. The institutions of the Left — from the ACLU to the radical feminist movement — do seek not to help people become better, but only to force society to accept and REWARD people AS THEY ARE, unchanged.

On the policy level, one finds that the Right seeks to promote those behaviors that best help people to achieve their goals. The Left works only to undermine the recognition of those bettter behaviors and then to legislate policy that seeks to (somewhat) mitigate the consequences of the failure to engage in the better behaviors.

For example, the Right recognizes that childhood abstinence is a behavior that improves the child’s chances for future success. To us it’s a no-brainer that unwanted pregnancies, grisly abortions and being infected with sexually transmitted diseases makes less likely the child free to achieve as much with their lives as they would like. The Left, on the other hand, sees the promotion of the better behavior as a form of bigotry, calling it the work of “religious fanatics” or the “sexually repressed,” and, in turn, work to rehabilitate the image of promiscuity in their movies, TV shows, schools and the legislatures they control. When this promotion of the destructive behaviors lead — as they have and must — to the undermining of the child’s future success, the Democrat then seeks policies designed to lessen the suffering that they themselves induced.

So, where the Right Thinker promotes childhood and teenage abstinence (knowing full well that it won’t work 100 percent of the time, as NOTHING works 100 percent of the time), the Democrat promotes promiscuity and then advances policies like easy and free abortions to mitigate the consequences of childhood and teenage promiscuity. Similarly, when their policies lead — as they have and must — to an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases amongst the children of America (with fully one out of four young girls in New York City now infected with at least one or more STD) — they then put forth policy that forcibly injects ALL children with one vaccine or another to make less likely the chance of contracting one of the STDs that now run rampant.
The problem, of course, beyond the mere moral destruction of our society and the theft of the innocence of the youth of America, is that, while some of these vaccines — injected into even the children who act in the better ways — may prevent ONE of these diseases, it does nothing to prevent a whole range of others.

Another example of this paradigm is the Rights’ insistence that immigrants learn to speak English. It is self-evident to those of us on the Right that the ability to speak the language of the majority is a big plus for those immigrant who wish to accomplish their dreams in America. Clearly, if an immigrant is a salesman, he can sell to more people if he speaks the language of the majority. If the immigrant is a scientist, he can apply for a job as a scientist at AMGEN or Johnson and Johnson. If he DOESN’T speak the language of the other scientists, the ONLY job he can get is one where his communications skills are of minimal importance, such as the minimum wage job of janitor.

The Left, on the other hand, sees the insistence that one learn the language of the majority as a form of bigotry. Some have gone so far as to call it an attempt by the Right to commit “cultural genocide” of the immigrant. For this reason the Left works to undermine efforts to encourage the immigrant to learn the language of the majority, guaranteeing that they will be locked into minimum wage jobs, and then hop into action to mitigate the suffering of those they have forced to suffer by insisting upon a raise in the minimum wage.

It gets worse. Since the immigrant has rights, in order to satisfy these rights, the majority must learn the many, many languages of the immigrants. Voting documents must be printed up in hundreds of languages while police departments in every city and town must learn to speak Spanish (etc) in order to properly “Mirandize” suspected criminals.

In other words, once again, the indiscriminateness of thought that is the defining trait of the Modern Liberal movement leads the Modern Liberal to create an Orwellian world where their subjects suffer, while a cultural genocide IS taking place — against America and against our children.

I am thankful that I live in a time so prosperous we really believe that the current economic downturn is “the worst economic disaster” in history. Man, are WE spoiled.

I am grateful that I live in a time and a place where good health is so universal, far from worrying about horrific diseases, we have a pill for “Restless Leg Syndrome.”

I am thankful –President Bush kept us safe from such attacks while he was in office after 9/11.

I am grateful for a nation where Jews have it better than at any time and in any place in our long and often tortured history. I am thankful that “racism” in America is so non-existent that, in the past year or so, the “worst” example of racism even the race-profiteers could conjure up was some 67-year-old shock jock making a bad joke about basketball players using the “authentic” black vernacular.

I am thankful to live in a time and a place where disease is virtually unknown, a time a place where Ebola is unheard of and “Restless Leg Syndrome” our biggest health problem. I am grateful to live in a land of so much plenty that even the “poor” are fat.

I am thankful to live in a time and a place where “stand-up comedy” is a viable — even lucrative — profession. Telling jokes for a living? Could you image that in Anceint Egypt? How about in Africa today?

I am thankful in general. It’s a trait I didn’t always possess. I believe it to be now the core of my happiness and something I wish others would practice instead of their overriding sense of entitlement and the disappointement in not having everything they “deserve” simply handed to them. Whatever disappointments and hard times one may face — to face it at this time and in this place is an unprecedented blessing, one for which I am eternally thankful.

Oh, there are other causes as well – but they, too, are a reflection of the union because the problem with unions is the same problem with our culture in general – the near-complete divorcing of reward from merit.

If students can’t read, then how did they make it to the eighth grade in the first place?  The answer is that their grades were inflated and thus they were rewarded with grades they did not merit.  They are in the eight grade because they received “social promotions,” rewards given to children obviously not based on their scholastic aptitude but on the Modern Liberal premise that not rewarding them might hurt their self-esteem.  In fact, the entire “self-esteem” movement which began with the Leftist take-over of our culture is predicated on reward (feeling good about yourself) without merit (doing something good.)

The unmerited promotion of the incapable student was delivered to him by those whose union membership ensures that they continue to be employed whether their work merits continued employment or, more likely than not given their failure to educate those eighth graders, it doesn’t.  These same teachers vehemently reject pay based on merit, with raises automatically given on a schedule that has nothing to do with whether or not they have bothered to educate the children.

The very concept of collective bargaining is designed not only to undermine the merit-reward relationship but to invert it.  In a merit-based system, the best and hardest working employee can demand the highest compensation while the laziest and most incompetent is paid the least.  In the collective, however, the best worker must forfeit the most in order to see the least able receive a far higher salary than his work merits.

Of course, only the most superhumanly altruistic worker is going to continue to go above and beyond while being underpaid and compensated at exactly the level he would be paid no matter how lazy and incompetent he or she is, while it is just as unlikely that the lazy and incompetent person who might raise his skills and efforts in order to receive higher compensation is going to do so knowing there’s no more money to be made by doing good work than in continuing to do bad work.

Unions divorce merit from reward even further by, in many states – including Wisconsin – making union membership mandatory.  When a citizen is compelled to do something it is specifically because it is well understood that, unless his freedom is taken away, he would not do what those with the power want him to do.  In this case, the unions are well-aware of the fact that their use of worker’s money for personal aggrandizement (huge salaries, palacial offices, globe-trotting to attend “seminars” and, of course, their redirection of funds to the Democrat Party and other Leftwing causes) would not be very popular with the working people and union membership would plunge just as it has in every location and every profession where the worker is not forced at the point of a gun (or his family’s ability to eat) to do so.  Put simply, the unions know that if membership weren’t compelled, their rewards would suddenly be related to their meriting those rewards and they’d rapidly go out of business.

For these reasons (and others) even the union members should be in favor of taking the gun away from their neighbors’ heads and allowing for union membership to be voluntary.  After all, the better workers are subsidizing their lazy and incompetent colleagues and, with a union that must suddenly base its survival on appealing to the workers rather than forcing them at gunpoint to cough up their wages, the unions would have to work harder to merit membership.

There are powerful arguments against public sector unions in particular.  One is that the government typically takes on jobs specifically because the private sector cannot do it.  If the consumer is unhappy with their cable company, for example, they can turn to the Dish Network.  If a consumer is unhappy with the police force, there’s nowhere for the citizenry to turn. This means that these workers have a monopoly that already acts as a powerful weapon in negotiating their salaries, benefits and working conditions.

The second reason that public sector unions should be outlawed – a point made by the great Dennis Prager on a recent radio show – is that the public sector is the only sector where the employees vote to determine who will be their boss and who they will be negotiating with.  No wonder these teachers are making six-figures with lifetime guarantees while producing children who can’t read – lots of money for very little work is what happens when reward is divorced from merit, unions enforce that arrangement and the people who stand between these workers and their unions and those who will negotiate their contracts are selected by the workers and unions themselves.

~~~~~

If you liked this article, you will probably love Evan’s book. Have you read it yet? Click here to get it for your kindle. You can get it in pdf format or the paperback, by adding to your shopping cart, below.

The KinderGarden Of Eden Paperback

The print version of the KinderGarden of Eden, from the man Dennis Miller, Larry Elder & Dennis Prager call "brilliant." This book has even been compared to Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny." Based on the famous talk Evan gave to the Heritage Foundation, which Andrew Breitbart called "One of the five most important conservative speeches ever given."

Price: $11.99

The KinderGarden of Eden e-Book (pdf)

The pdf version of the new blockbuster book that was just released!

Price: $4.99