PEGGY NOONAN: Privacy Isn’t All We’re Losing: The surveillance state threatens Americans’ love of country. Under Obama, it’s become less lovable. I suspect this isn’t entirely an accident. “Trust in government, historically, ebbs and flows, and currently, because of the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, Benghazi, etc.—and the growing evidence that the executive agencies have been reduced to mere political tools—is at an ebb that may not be fully reversible anytime soon. It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government.”

Further thoughts here.

UPDATE: Poor Michael Gerson, who’s in the embarrassing position of being less clueful than Peggy Noonan.