As for trusting the government not to abuse its powers, well, there are those lies just mentioned. And then there’s the whole business of sending the IRS out to target President Obama’s political opponents. As Peggy Noonan observes: “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.”

Well, maybe it’s ironic. Or maybe there’s less of a contradiction between wanting to expand government power and being willing to abuse it than Noonan thinks. If it’s ironic, it’s because one argument we heard from Democrats during the Bush era was that Republicans — because they distrust big government — are inherently unsuited to run a big government, prone to incompetence because they don’t respect the institutions they control.