As Ed argued earlier this week, all of the scandalous details — ranging from the eyebrow-raising to the downright frightening — leaking out of the White House recently are kind of an enormous crimp in the progressive argument for a larger and still more activist government. President Obama might want young people to take his word for it that they need to “reject those voices” that “incessantly warn of government” and tyranny lurking “just around every corner,” because all of those people are just a bunch of irascible scaremongers, haters, and naysayers — but his own administration is doing a rather poor job of demonstrating why it is those people are oh so very off base.

For some solid Friday op-ed reading, Louisiana Governor Bobby J chimed in on Scandalmania, and why a robust skepticism for big government is a very healthy thing for a society to have:

The latest problems with the IRS witch hunt, the seizure of phone records from The Associated Press, the conflicting Benghazi stories and disastrous attempts to enforce Obamacare may all seem unrelated, but they are not.

Each of these events is the direct byproduct of two central philosophies of the Obama administration — the massive expansion of the size and power of the federal government and a lack of trust in the American people. …

We don’t know what the president knew of these matters before they became public, and it strains credulity to suggest that his top political advisers were in the dark. But again, when you grow government this big, these kinds of scandals are inevitable, and he bears the responsibility for that. …

The Obama presidency, and liberalism in general, are based on not trusting the American people — a belief that big government is better for people. The latest scandals show why liberalism and big government don’t work. …

Many are wondering aloud if these scandals will tarnish Obama’s legacy or weaken his presidency or cause his popularity to drop. Some of that will probably occur, but it’s not the ever-charming Obama who will suffer the most from these scandals. No, fortunately the biggest loser here will be the paternalistic big government liberalism that Obama has foisted upon us.

Whether it’s from incompetence or a lack of accountability or too much complexity or — dare I even write it — something perhaps more sinister, the layers of a large bureaucracy conveniently provide too many available smokescreens for mistakes and abuses. I doubt very much that we’ve seen the last of these types of big-government engendered injustices coming out of the Obama administration, and none of it makes a very compelling case for growing the government still further.