I caught the tail-end of Glenn Beck's radio program today and was impressed to write about it. Here is my transcript:

May I read this to you?

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap... between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with... And it became always wider. You know, it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to have a civilian defense force, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with [a leader], their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

That is from a chapter "Then It Was Too Late" from the book "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" ( See here ).

That could have been written today!

That doesn't mean we are headed for that... Let me rephrase that. Let me be more clear.

It doesn't mean that this president or this congress will take us there, but it does mean that the more power we give this government, the more we allow them to become more and more remote to us, indifferent to us; The more power we give them to decide our fate and decide who should be listened to and who shouldn't be, who should live and who should die, who is politically correct and who is not, who should succeed and who should fail; The more we let them decide those things... It may not be this president. It may not be this congress. But will be in our future because all we have to do is elect the wrong person... once... and they have all the structure they need. Let's not finish the job Germany started in 1898.

We're headed down the same pathways and both parties have been involved.

I've had a few conversations recently with people who think Glenn is a "nutjob," a "kook," and a "loon." Or... perhaps the most amusing characterization is that he's a shill for the Republican party and an apologist for George W. Bush.

It's obvious to me that these people have never really listened to the man.