Breathtaking Card Check Lying

You've got to be a little amazed at how brazenly dishonest partisans can be. Take for example the oft repeated canard that the Employee Free Choice Act would take away "an employee's right to have a secret ballot" on the issue of forming a union.

Not only is that claim false, its a complete perversion of the actual state of the law. First of all, employees do not have the right to call for a secret ballot on the issue of forming a union. Yes, that's right, employees do not have that right.

Employers have that right. Under current law, if a majority of a firm's employees sign up to join a union, employers can insist on a secret ballot - an option they almost always take to buy time to convince their workers not to unionize. (I'll leave their methods of persuasion to your imagination, for now anyway).

The Employee Free Choice Act would take that right away from employers and give it to employees. It would allow employees to make the decision as to whether or not to have a secret ballot.

In other words, the EFCA would remove a big union busting club that employers currently have at their disposal. That's why businesses hate the proposal and unions love it.

Politicians who tell these kinds of breathtakenly brazen lies are nothing but shameless partisans who know they can't win the argument on the merits. The truth is simply irrelevant to them - they feel no obligation to it.

And truth be told, lying like this ultimately corrodes the soul. In fact, the fate of the national Republican party is, at least in part, a cautionary tale with regards to this sort of lying. I've followed politics for many years and one thing has always been clear - most of what Republicans wanted to do has never been popular and most of what they opposed was popular. And the Republican strategy has generally been simply to lie about what they were trying to do.

I could give you dozens of examples of this behavior, but the EFCA lie is illustrative. The Iraq war is also illustrative. Sarah Palin is an example of the ultimate fruit of habitual lying - lying to yourself.

It doesn't quite seem like they've learned their lesson. But what doth it profit a political party to beat back card check (for a year) but lose its soul?

By the way, I'm open to examples of political liars on the left, but they don't seem as prevalent. That's partly because there aren't too many people on the left to begin with.

Joe H.