The All Seeing State

I'm not a conspiracy guy.  In fact, I have a rock hard belief that any conspiracy that would involve the actions of more than a handful of people is virtually impossible to operate.  Communications break down, or some has a change of conscience and the gig is up.  If you'd told me a month ago that we had something to fear from our own government, I would have been skeptical.  Oh, I understand the potential dangers.  And small elements of the government, like maniacal prosecutors or petty policeman can be a big problem to an individual, but the odds of you personally being threatened by one is pretty small.  In other words, I knew there was a danger out there but not one that I actively worried about.
Well, the past month has been pretty hard on my faith in good government.  The IRS scandal wounded that faith.  I think Mark Steyn gets at the reason behind it:

What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.

 No one stood up and said, 'hey, we shouldn't be doing this'.  And even now, after the IRS had admitted that it did the wrong thing, various defenders keep trying to figure out why this wasn't such a big deal.  (Btw, screw you, various defenders.  What you deserve is to get the same actions during the next administration.  That would make things even worse though, so I hope that you avoid it.)
It's been pointed out that when the Bush administration was being grilled over the Plame affair (much smaller deal), W Bush publicly told everyone that he wanted them to cooperate to the fullest.  So far, with Obama, the pattern has been to promote those responsible and go after the whistleblowers. 
If you voted for Hope and Change, you got duped.