The King Midas touch in reverse.
by Tom Adkins
10/16/01

"How many union workers does it take to change a light bulb?
Thirty-seven. You gotta problem wit dat, pal?"

After tragic events on September 11th, Congress is huffing over airport security with typical myopic pomp. Incredibly, in the midst of our new war, Democrats are trying to sneak something dangerous under our own domestic radar screen. More frightening than bombs, potentially more deadly than Anthrax, Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle is calling for a "federalization" of the security staffers who run our Swiss-cheese security system. That's right, folks. Remember the gang that brought you Welfare, midnight basketball and the $687 hammer? Now, they want to be America's baggage inspectors. Feel safer?

Let's consider the typical government employee. You've probably met one. Maybe it was half-blind Marge at the DMV who went to lunch just before your turn to take the driver's test. Or that local zoning officer who took 14 weeks to issue a building permit for your deck, but fined you $50 for your azalea bush growing 5 inches over the sidewalk. It might have been that tax form you requested eight months ago to satisfy the request the IRS made ten months ago that they told you wasn't needed five months ago, even though you keep getting a monthly letter demanding you send in that form. Or the phone call you made to some long forgotten department that kept ringing and ringing and ringing.

Sure, Senator Daschle. Half-blind Marge just transferred in from the DMV. Let's have her work the X-ray machine.

Just the thought of a federalized safety employee should scare anyone into driving the family sedan. Government bureaucracies create amazing incompetence, wasting gargantuan piles of money while hardly keeping track of themselves. The Department of Defense spent $200 billion on obsolete four-year-old computers, which were used to buy $30 billion of unnecessary spare parts. The DOD even lost a few billion dollars worth of airplanes. You know.those big things with wings? You may have seen them plowing into the World Trade Center a few weeks back. They aren't really sure how many planes vanished, or where they might be hiding. But with 161 separate accounting systems at DOD. How could anyone know? The Pentagon is but a microcosm of the entire bloated federal bureaucracy, which safely stands guilty of creating more mess and mayhem than it ever fixes.

So why is Daschle all excited about "federalizing" baggage inspectors? Unions. Today, there are 2 million federal employees, at a combined annual salary of $170,000,000,000. Most are unionized. That's a lot of union dues. And almost all of it goes to the Democrats.

So why is that frightening? Because many unions have mutated from collectively representing the working man into a refuge for lazy, leeching dolts, driving the union workplace into bovine mediocrity. Painters unions often outlaw rollers. Teachers unions fight to maintain frightening incompetence in our schools. Philadelphia's convention center is so rooted in union turf battles, make-work rules create hours of heated debate, often providing entertaining fistfights while jobs are sorted out. And union corruption is legendary.

At least the private sector forces unions and management into a healthy dead wood elimination battle. That doesn't exist anywhere in the federal bureaucracy. Hooray! We get the worst of both worlds. Government employees are virtually impossible to fire, fully protected from anything short of a direct atomic blast. Once aboard the government gravy train, you have a job as long as your breath faintly fogs a mirror.

Comforting to think of a unionized government employee in charge of weeding terrorists from tourists, eh?

Certainly, government workers know who butters their bread. Few groups are deeper in the pocket of the Democrat Party. No wonder Tom Daschle is almost slobbering at the thought of thousands of new union members.

I gotta hand it to Daschle. In the middle of a national crisis, he's sharp enough to exploit a political crack. It sure wouldn't be the first time Democrats sacrificed America's security for political gain; that's how we got into our current war in the first place. We must seriously question the wisdom of staffing our nation's security apparatus with typical government employees as long as Democrats staunchly defend their right of mediocrity in exchange for money, bribes and election votes. In a wartime crisis with national survival on the line, it appears Democrats are once again becoming a greater threat to America than the dreaded enemy.

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Written by Tom Adkins
Executive Publisher - CommonConservative.com