There are many lessons to be learned from the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin. First and foremost, workers in the public sector should never have been allowed to unionize. Once that happened, it was inevitable that civil servants would wind up being better paid and better pensioned than the folks in the private sector. That’s because they got to wind up negotiating with politicians who had nothing to lose by giving in to union demands.
It’s only in the private sector that the difference between resisting unreasonable demands or caving in is often the difference between a company’s making a profit or going out of business.
Of course, in the long run, as the citizens of Illinois, New York and California, now see, the end result of caving in by complicit liberal politicians and craven conservatives is bankruptcy.
There was a time when unions fought the good fight, but that was a very long time ago. Listening to the union members in Madison raving about the glorious accomplishments of unions is a lot like listening to Arabs boasting about all of their great contributions to mankind, and being reminded that they took place several centuries ago.
For sheer gall, it’s tough to find a better example than the union members claiming they’re doing it for the kids. Even the kids aren’t buying it.
When I saw Richard Trumka, the thug-like head of the AFL-CIO, rallying the troops, I fully expected him to say, “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for the teachers’ union.”
I wonder how any Wisconsin teacher who called in “sick” will ever again have the gall to report a kid for playing hooky.
Speaking of playing hooky, I am wondering if anyone has begun a campaign to recall any of the 14 Democratic state senators who have been hiding out in Illinois. Justice delayed, after all, is justice denied. Keep in mind that it’s only a rumor, but 14 members of the Muslim Brotherhood have allegedly offered to replace them. Their contention is that even though they’re Islamic terrorists, they always show up for work. They also point out that they are more than willing to do the work that some Americans apparently won’t do.
However, I don’t expect any of our legislators in Washington, D.C., will be casting stones at their Wisconsin colleagues. After all, even with time running out on the federal budget, those 535 seat-warmers took off the entire week to celebrate President’s Day.
One of the items on the congressional agenda deals with federal funding of Planned Parenthood. At the very least, they should have to undergo a name change because the group is far less concerned with planning parenthood than it is with avoiding it. Its stock in trade is performing abortions, and yet those who defend federal funding for the organization pretend that abortions are only a small part of the health services provided. They are lying.
Frankly, in this day and age, between the sex education classes that seem to start in nursery school and all the pills and contraceptive devices, I’m surprised that abortions are still being performed. But in a typical year, Planned Parenthood, alone, performs over 300,000 of them. It makes you wonder if the message of all those sex education classes is that prophylactics only work on bananas.
In the ongoing debate about abortions, the line I have come to despise the most is the pro-choice mantra that an embryo is part of a woman’s body — rather like a mole — and she has every right to have it removed.
Well, to begin with, nobody ever painted a room pink or blue or threw a baby shower for a mole. In addition, nobody ever named one after a beloved parent or grandparent or mortgaged their home to send a mole to college.
What’s more, if it so happened that it was men, rather than women, who gave birth, I don’t believe for a second that there’s a woman alive who’d say, “Well, it is part of his body and he has every right to do with it what he wants.”
Burt Prelutsky is a humor columnist, a movie critic and a writer for TV. He’s written episodes of MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Family Ties, Dr. Quinn and Diagnosis Murder. He is the author of “Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco” and “Liberals: America’s Termites or It’s a Shame That Liberals, Unlike Hamsters, Never Eat Their Young,” along with two collections of interviews, “The Secret of Their Success” and “Portraits of Success.” He blogs at BurtPrelutsky.com.