The Know Nothing, Say Nothing, Manage Nothing US Government

Although we have many examples of President Obama knowing nothing, today's announcement by staunch spy manager and supporter Diane Feinstein that she knew nothing about the spying on world leaders conducted under her supervision brings home the fancy politics of "know nothing." When everything else fails, do not take the Fifth. Take the "know nothing" defense, with a bit of "say nothing" and "manage nothing" thrown in when necessary.

The Obama Administration and its admirers have taken this art well-beyond anything the American public has seen before. Not only is it "know nothing," it is also manage nothing. Have a bill? As Representative Pelosi said in connection with the Affordable Care Act, wait to read it until after it is passed, the ultimate in "know nothing" self-defense.

There is every reason to believe that each of these players, from President Obama to Senator Feinstein to James Clapper not only should have known what was going on but did. Why would any sentient voter in the US believe that a trapping system that catches foreign communications would not trap those with foreign government officials?

Whether they truly knew nothing is beyond the point. The point is that they should have known much more than something. And that government at any level is committed not to keep its actions from us or just lie, as has happened from the Affordable Care Act to Benghazi, from Executive Privilege to keeping us safe.

Whether this concept had its roots in the Know Nothing party, a group that was supposed to announce "I know nothing" if asked anything about what was going on, is uncertain and probably worthy of a much larger work. Still, as we know, we will know nothing because everyone involved, judges who cannot even keep a record, our president, Congressional members and staff elevated to the position of "know something," and of course our spies, are required by law to say they cannot tell us what they know. We now have laws that enforce "know nothing."

And we are told that knowing nothing, saying nothing, and even managing nothing makes sense in the absence of public discovery of what is going on.

In the middle of this, we have some apparently strange bedfellows. Rand and Ron Paul, Judge Napolitano, and Congressman John Conyers. According to Conyers: 

"It's my fear that we are on the verge of becoming a surveillance state, collecting billions of electronic records on law-abiding Americans every single day." A few hours after Conyers spoke, Republican Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite and lifelong fan of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand, announced he was filing a lawsuit against the NSA for abuse of power.

Why is this utter irresponsibility ignored by everyone of influence? Does the public really want this? Can Rand Paul win his lawsuit against President Obama's spy apparatus?

Few issues are more important to liberty than to keep the government from unconstitutional intrusions into our lives. Let's hope these and many others manage to change our spying landscape. After all, just how long can a few unsupported claims that the information somehow "helped" capture five or fewer "terrorists" keep our country spending trillions on keeping it safe, invade everyone's privacy, and kill whomever our president wants, because of "safeguards" that turn out to have those managing our "programs" claim they knew nothing? We can hope that even the conservative members of the US Supreme Court will have trouble with that one.