A Matter of Trust

Thomas Sowell wrote an excellent article about the whole NSA/Prism "scandal" and why it has so many people's panties in a bunch. I have to admit, along with the IRS thing, mine got a little twisted as well once it came out. His take is not the fact that they were doing this, since they are not listening to the phone calls, but seeing who is calling who (The argument has been that this is the same as reading the outside of an envelope, its public who it is being sent to, but the contents are unknown.), but that we don't trust the folks in charge to use it as intended. A snippit;

In other words, we do not have a choice whether to trust or not to trust government officials. Unless we are willing to risk anarchy or terrorism, the most we can do is set up checks and balances within government -- and be a lot more careful in the future than we have been in the past when deciding whom to elect.

So we have to trust them to know what they are doing because they are the experts and know more about what is going on around the world and with terrorism than we do. Where it becomes sticky is who is in charge of it.

Even those of us who were not John F. Kennedy supporters, and who were not dazzled by the glitter and glamour of the Kennedy aura, nevertheless felt that the President of the United States was someone who knew much more than we did about the realities on which all our lives depended.

Whatever happened to that feeling? Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon happened -- and both were shameless liars. They destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility of the office.

So, No matter if "he only just found out about it" or it was "Just contained to one office in a far off branch in another city", or whatever excuse they give for why it happened and they "didn't know it was going on" there is only one conclusion to all of this,

When Barack Obama squanders his own credibility with his glib lies, he is not just injuring himself during his time in office. He is inflicting a lasting wound on the country as a whole. But we the voters are not blameless. Having chosen an untested man to be president, on the basis of rhetoric, style and symbolism, we have ourselves to blame if we now have only a choice between two potentially tragic fates -- the loss of American lives to terrorism or a further dismantling of our freedoms that has already led many people to ask: "Is this still America?"

Read the article here