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This is the emerging defense of the government in “the metadata scandal.” President Obama told a California audience Friday that before he was president he, too, had “a healthy skepticism” of the aggressive intelligence services, but now, with further safeguards, which he did not identify, he decided that snooping is worth it.

“You can’t have 100 percent security, and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he says. A speechwriter’s clever line, but it was an answer to a question that nobody had raised. Critics of Big Brother don’t expect a hundred percent of anything, they just don’t trust the big bully more than maybe 2 percent.

James Clapper, director of U.S. intelligence, pours on a little soothing syrup. The snooping, he says, “cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. persons located outside the United States.” Of course not. But note the weasel word “intentionally,” and what, exactly, is a “U.S. person” if he is not a citizen? The Washington Post reports that, while in one surveillance program American citizens are not “intended” to be targets of surveillance, large quantities of “content” from Americans are nevertheless screened to track or learn more about the target.

Fear is a great motivator, and in the wake of 9/11 the politicians, frightened themselves, used fear of further attacks to persuade us to give in to the darkest terrors of the night. We tolerated the intrusions of the security state, the groping in the long lines at the airports, the barriers around government buildings. George W. Bush even allowed the Secret Service to close Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House to use as a convenient parking lot for government cars. In a fit of fear we assumed, as Peggy Noonan observes in the Wall Street Journal, that “we’ll just do it now, and down the road we can stop it. It’s just an emergency thing. We can make it go away when we no longer want it. But can we? Do government programs tend to remain static, or wither? Or do they tend to grow?”

The intelligence services do some good things, and presidents necessarily rely on them, though new presidents get intelligence briefings designed to scare them into going along with schemes they once reviled. The world is truly a scarier place than the rest of us can imagine. But the spooks have to be watched, listened to - but not necessarily agreed with. Spooks by nature see the world through dark glasses and look for shortcuts across the Constitution to “do evil so that good may come.”

His stunning re-election last year erased all the fears that public adoration for him had cooled. Now, we were told, the romance would be as hot as ever. The Democrats would have a permanent majority; the pitiless application of state power would destroy the hated conservatives once and for all, with their pathetic obsessions with God, the Constitution and the traditional family, and it would be smooth sailing to an American welfare state, with everybody dependent on a government run by Democratic liberals, radicals and opportunists.

But that was before success began to recede. The president is not out of the game; presidents, with all the trappings and opportunities of power, never are, particularly a president with years left to control and manipulate the government. But this president is weakened to the point of ineffectiveness and his gloomy media chorus, if not yet silenced by cold reality, must now sing a different song.

No one, except for the vicious sopranos in that chorus, will be tempted now to accuse quite so loudly the president’s critics of racism, bigotry and intolerance just for pointing out the flaws in his agenda or taking note of his personal and presidential shortcomings. That dog, in the telling bucolic cliché, won’t hunt now. That dog is dead (and dead dogs smell bad).

The current scandals – Benghazi, IRS and the hounding of The Associated Press and other organs of the press – only emphasize what ails Mr. Obama and his administration, of the corruption and above all the incompetence. None of the scandals touch the president personally, nor are they likely to. Every president has a guard around him to make sure the dirt won’t stick to him. But it’s the accumulation of the dirt around him that renders him ineffective, impotent and what the English call “wet.”

The president was elected in the first place because the nation embarked on a guilt trip, with millions of white voters out to show contrite repentance for the sins of segregation and decades of racial oppression. Barack Obama looked like the perfect candidate for the guilt-trippers: attractive, well spoken, educated and what Joe Biden called “clean.” (This last could be construed as a bit racist, but Joe usually runs his mouth just to see what comes out of it, so he gets a pass). No one was willing then to look very hard at Mr. Obama’s background, his friendships with left-wing radicals and domestic terrorists, and his work as a “community activist” promoting left-wing causes. To look very hard would have ruined the thrill of a romance.

He threw a tantrum after Barack Obama’s gun-control bill crashed and burned in Congress, stamping his polished wingtips on his Persian carpets, nursing a pout and behaving like a 3-year-old with a broken toy. This was excusable in a 3-year-old, but it’s not the behavior you expect of the nanny.

When the wah-wah and the bitter tears subsided, the mayor of New York set out to fix everything with his billions. His money fixed the election laws in New York, so why couldn’t his billions similarly manipulate a few elections in flyover country? His honor, the fourth (or fifth) richest man in the world (not that there’s anything wrong with that), is nevertheless a man of the people who rides the subway to work, although according to the New York Times two police department SUVs take him to a station some distance from his manse on East 79th Street so he can take the express train downtown. Doesn’t everyone commute that way? He has other houses, in London, Bermuda and Vail, one or two closer to the streetcar line. Doesn’t everyone?

His Honor just doesn’t like guns. Guns, like a 16-ounce bottle of soda pop, frighten him. That’s why he has a police detail to shadow him everywhere he goes, lest a wild Slurpee lunge at him from the shadows. Doesn’t everyone?

The nanny, like the shadow, knows the evil that lurks in the hearts of men, so he set out to punish several congressmen who he thinks particularly deserve a good spanking. One of them is Mark Pryor, the Democratic senator from Arkansas who is threatened by the Republican wave that has transformed the politics of the last state of what was once the Solid South, and only yesterday the most reliable redoubt of the Democratic Party.

The mayor put out $350,000 – a mere tip for the men’s room attendant at the Hotel Carlisle for the fourth-richest man in the world – to produce a television commercial telling Arkansas voters what they already knew: Mark Pryor voted against the Obama gun legislation. Pryor likes guns! Pour it on! With an enemy like Mike Bloomberg, who needs a friend?

The lugubrious Bloomberg commercial shamelessly exploits the death of Bill Gwatney, the popular chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, who was shot and killed in 2008 by a deranged man who walked into his office in downtown Little Rock, shook his hand, pulled out a revolver and shot him three times in the chest. He died several hours later. This, the Bloomberg commercial suggests, is just the grim future Mark Pryor’s vote for guns assures everybody.

This was the unexpected break the senator was praying for. Only the terminally timid are frightened by guns in Arkansas, where a boy typically anticipates getting a .22-caliber rifle for his 12th birthday (and the stern lecture from his father that goes with it). The senator, who voted for separate legislation to strengthen funding for mental health programs, gave it back harder to the mayor: “Mike Bloomberg didn’t know Bill Gwatney,” he said. “I knew Bill Gwatney. He was my friend and he was killed by someone with severe mental-health issues. The mayor’s bill would have done nothing to prevent his death because it fails to adequately address the real issue and common thread in all these shootings – mental health.”

The man most likely to run against Mark Pryor is a freshman congressman, Tom Cotton, who really, really does like guns. He’s rarely photographed without one. He looks too good to be true. He grew up in small-town Arkansas, went to Harvard, gave up the law after 9/11 to join the Army, disdaining a posting as an Army lawyer to lead an infantry company in Iraq and then Afghanistan, where he received a Bronze Star for heroism in combat. He has run in 11 marathons and earlier this year was named “the fastest man in Congress” after he won a three-mile congressional minimarathon in under 18 minutes. At 36 and 6 foot 5 inches tall, he looks like a candidate consultants dream of.

He’s a nightmare for Mark Pryor, the son of a senator and trying to survive as a Democrat in a newly Republican state. He has a long slog to re-election, but a genius from New York City just made it a little easier.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Republicans tempted to reach too far too soon should remember that when impeachable presidents, like persimmons, are picked green, they’re inedible. Once ripened, they’re delicious.

Like guilty presidents finally run to ground, ripe persimmons can be eaten fresh, dried, raw, or cooked. Properly ripened persimmons have the texture of pudding, with no risk of becoming “a pudding without a theme,” as Winston Churchill once complained of a dessert unfit for a prime minister. The flesh of a mature persimmon, like a mature presidential scandal, is very sweet on the tongues of a president’s enemies.

Green persimmons, bitter and acidic, only inflict the pain of an unexpected pucker. It’s important to pick neither persimmon nor scandal before its time.

Republicans, on the run only a month ago with no sure strategy for stopping President Obama’s runaway second term, with Atty. Gen. Eric Holder holding his horse, now have a surfeit of scandals, particularly satisfying since it’s served up by a reluctant mainstream media. If you’re weary of Benghazi, there’s the tasty pursuit of uppity journalists. You can sample a little of the latest Benghazi salad or sauteed journalist while anticipating the main course, deep-fried tax collector. Or you can shake up all three scandals and change the order on the menu for tomorrow. There’s a new delight coming out of the kitchen almost on the hour.

The mainstream media, so called, thought it had the Benghazi scandal safely bottled up until the other two broke. Benghazi seems to be misfeasance of office, lawful but awful, probably legal but something that earlier generations of Americans would have regarded as unforgivable – a commander in chief abandoning Americans in distress to the mercies of a brutal enemy. Abusing journalists and using the Internal Revenue Service to punish political enemies is more like malfeasance, unlawful and dreadful. If these are not high crimes they’re at least misdemeanors, and either is constitutional grounds for impeachment.

The White House is furiously peddling the excuses that Benghazi isn’t a scandal because it happened a long time ago, abusing journalists is outrageous, terrible, contemptible, abominable (pick your own approved adjective) and maybe the IRS was naughty but nobody in the Obama administration can be held responsible because the evil-doers were only rogues. Besides, it happened in Cincinnati, and two lowly IRS grunions have been sacked.

Thin gruel, indeed, and less persuasive with every news cycle. An official of the IRS in the Cincinnati office told The Washington Post over the weekend that the Cincinnati office is blameless because it was only doing what Washington headquarters asked for. “We’re not political,” the IRS official told The Post. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

The Justice Department has been after reporters for a long time, through Republican as well as Democratic administrations. John Solomon, former deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press and later executive editor of The Washington Times, tells in The Times’ Tuesday editions how his phone calls and email exchanges from both home and office were monitored for years by the Justice Department. And not just his telephone records. Once, when a source in the Philippines sent a package of material by FedEx, it was lost. Suspecting that it was not lost but “lost,” he tracked it to a FedEx clerk who told him, with a raised eyebrow in his voice, that “it fell off a horse cart in Manila and must have gotten lost.”

Like so much that the Obama administration has borrowed from its predecessors, the illegal pursuit of journalists continues. James Rosen, a correspondent for Fox News, is the latest example. The Justice Department tracked his telephone records, emails and even his movements to meet sources face to face. The government says it was pursuing “national security leaks,” but the more we learn, the greater the suspicion that the government is monitoring hostile politics.

This story is just beginning, and before we learn how far and wide the corruption goes, the president will be buying aspirin by the pound. Mr. Obama, like presidents before him, just thinks he has preserved credible deniability. Patience, as his critics will learn if they keep their voices down until it’s time to shout, can be its own reward.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.