In no particular order, we’ve had in just the last few months the following:

1.  The State Department leaving Benghazi consulate personnel to die, with too little security and no effort to help real-time; a President who absented himself from the situation in favor of a political campaign; and subsequent lies and cover-ups by both about events surrounding that.

2.  The Department of Justice targeting our free press and individual members of it in order to suppress reporting of the secret doings of our government.

3.  The Internal Revenue Service targeting American conservatives.  The low-level IRS staffers now are testifying before the House that they weren’t just ordered to target those who disagreed with the present administration, they were given the specific subjects and questions to be used and to forward specific cases to their bosses for further “treatment.”

And there’s this little IRS gem:

On May 23, Michigan Senator Carl Levin (D, MI) dropped the bombshell that his subcommittee has been in constant contact with the overseers of the IRS political-targeting scandal since it started, and even discussed the applications of “certain” specific groups.

4.  The secret metadata collection program, consisting of the gathering up of the phone calling records of millions of Americans who use Verizon (and presumably of the other American phone companies, also; we don’t know yet because the whole thing is…secret).

5.  The reading of all of our emails, text messages, video down/uploads, and so on via the Internet through another secret program, this one called PRISM.

6.  The government justifying the spying on Americans by claiming it to be a

critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.

And

The information “allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” a senior Obama administration official said Thursday.

This in light of the fact that DHS has already labelled (deliberately and overtly, early on) American military veterans and those who oppose the Obama administration as extremists and threats.  Thus, it’s important to note that the information, as broadly swept up as it is, also allows a Progressive government to surveill known or suspected persons who disagree with the government’s policies and to hinder their activities.