The NSA, that is, National Spy Agency . . .

There are reasons for being suspicious of our government.  And keep in mind that being against the government is not the same thing as being against the country.  We're just talking about the guys running the place, you know, the current four branches of government, the judiciary, the legislature, the executive, and the vast unelected civil service.  (Yeah, there's four, that is, one more than your teacher, who didn't know any better, told you about in the seventh grade.)

Let's see.  There's Fast and Furious.  There's Sibelius.  There's Bengahzi.  Then there's the Bengahzi cover-up.  There's the IRS being politicalized.  And there's the NSA wiretapping deal.  There may be more that I've forgotten.  Any of these could be enough to shake up the White House.  After all, with Nixon, the problem was bugging just the Democratic campaign offices, and that was enough.  But the NSA has bugged the entire country, including your voice calls, email, texts, etc.  A ginormously huge data center is being built in Utah to store everything the NSA gets.

And this is potentially the worst of all.  First, I'm pretty sure there are hackers in China and Russia, and maybe Iran, who can't wait to hack into all this NSA data.  If they haven't already.  And of course, we have our own domestic hackers to worry about, not the mention the various government busybodies who are going to check you out.  And if they are collecting information from everybody, then everybody is the potential target, and it has nothing to do with actual guilt or 4th Amendment probable cause. 

Do you think that girl you dumped in your senior year has forgotten about it, now that she works for the Veteran's Administration where you just happen to be applying for benefits?  Let's just check you out.

But that isn't the worst of it because, second, there's a million dedicated, crazy conspiracy-theory paranoids out there, slapping their knee right now and saying, "I knew it!" 

We have a whole lot of crazy people running around loose, since the great psychiatric insight of the seventies -- that the best and most humane treatment for crazy people is to pretend they can function in normal society and to ignore them and their emotional pain until they commit a serious crime that gets them locked up for a time.

So here's a little message for all the crazy people. 

Boys and girls, just because it's true that the NSA really is collecting all sorts of information about everybody, not just foreign transactions, doesn't mean you haven't been crazy all this time.  You just caught a lucky break, but you are still crazy.  Even though all the electronic data is being collected, the government is still not spying on you and watching what you do through the light bulbs, not now and never was

At least not the old kind.

I'm not so sure about those new curly compact florescent kind.