Glenn to Uncle Sam: 'Leave me alone

That’s how Glenn opened this morning’s radio show—and for good reason.

The feds-as-helicopter-parents is a trend that’s gained more traction recently—a trend that’s at once scary and silly.

If the feds got out of the way and stopped regulating large and small businesses to death, maybe the free market could do what it’s designed to do and direct a way out of this virus-like financial crisis. Though since the White House apparently has lost faith in its campaign promise to create jobs—and certainly not by tomorrow—could it be that they’re rethinking things on Pennsylvania Avenue? (No? Well, it was worth a try.)

If the feds got out of the way and stopped creating ridiculous rules and regulations (read, for starters: the kiddie lemonade stand officials recently shut down and the bird-feeder owner who faces jail time because some bird seed—gasp!—touched blades of grass on his property), maybe the American populace could get back to more important concerns instead of figuring out how to keep uninvited elected officials and their appointees out of our front and back yards.

“Get government out of the way,” Glenn noted this morning. “That’s the silver bullet.”

But that’s only part of the solution, he soon pointed out. Americans need stop listening to government officials who’ve been taking what seems to be every last second of air time to castigate certain segments of citizenry and further divide an already polarized nation.

Sure, there's destructive demonizing drumbeats from the likes of Nancy Pelosi (i.e., Republicans want to “destroy everything”) and John Kerry (who’s apparently very, very afraid of the media spotlight enjoyed by big, bad, regularly beaten-up Tea Party). But only to the point where we—those of us who pay their salaries—listen to their divisive rhetoric and use it against each other.

Indeed, we’re “coming apart at the seams,” Glenn observed.

Read to the end for a key clip of Glenn talking to Brad Thor...

Beating each other up, literally and figuratively, over…nothing.

“What’s happened to this country where you can’t have a decent conversation?” Glenn asked, referencing our growing lack of civility over politics, religion, and class. “Is that all we have to talk about?” So we have ideological differences—so what? Can’t we acknowledge such differing viewpoints as a blessing to be cherished and move on to cover ground we have in common? Or is that too much of an effort?

Apparently it’s heavy lifting for the likes of Martin Bashir and Maureen Dowd, who’re clearly catching the tempo of the Pelosi/Kerry/et al. drumbeat and working some extended solos of their own.

Bashir & Co. turned in a nifty Tea-Partiers-are-cannibals-aliens-delusional-psychotic-addicts performance recently.  (You’d think the sane among us are saying, Okay, fella, enough’s enough—but not based on how we’re treating each other.)

Dowd delivered the coup de grace—a Beat Generation-inspired, bongo-pounding wallop in her New York Timescolumn (again, aimed at the Tea Party) last Wednesday, clearly fueled by some extra cups of java, a worn-out copy of On the Road, and enough monster movie references to make Jason Voorhees hyperventilate in his hockey mask:

They were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive. They were like vampires, draining the country’s reputation, credit rating and compassion. They were like zombies, relentlessly and mindlessly coming back again and again to assault their unnerved victims, Boehner and President Obama. They were like the metallic beasts in “Alien” flashing mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth, bursting out of Boehner’s stomach every time he came to a bouquet of microphones. (Conjuring that last image on Monday, Vladimir Putin described America as “a parasite.”)

What’s it going to take? Al Gore’s dream of an “American Spring” becoming a reality?

More violence? Less civility? More reliance on the feds (all while another trillion dollars is destroyed in a floundering stock market as we spiral into a deeper dungeon of debt)?

Less freedom with the promise of “more security”? (“Don’t make a move without us!” Glenn quipped, parroting the implied message from our creeping nanny state.)

Toward the end of this morning’s radio program, Glenn spoke with author Brad Thor (his new thriller, Full Black, just released). While you should check out the whole interview, listen especially to their chat around the 19-minute mark when Thor told Glenn that “the history of mankind is tyranny.”

What else do we need to know? Tyranny has been our default forever. And it’s happening everywhere and with alarmingly greater intensity and frequency.

Our only choice, as Glenn noted, is to “stand fast and fight back against it...freedom is being chased into the corner.”

We need to wise up, be of one mind on this thing, and “turn on the lights together and chase it out of the house.”

It's up to us.