Ronald Reagan was right when he stated that the federal government is not the solution and again when he said that the nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Having said all that, I do not share the fears of a great many on the Right who apparently lie awake nights worrying about the NSA listening in on their phone calls. From my earlier defense of the National Security Agency, I know that a number of my readers disagree. So be it. When push comes to shove, I prefer siding with Charles Krauthammer and John Bolton to sharing Rand Paul’s paranoia.

For one thing, even if Obama and his stooges wanted to listen in on a few billion phone calls a day, I don’t believe they are up to the task. But it does make me somewhat envious of all you folks who are having all those fascinating phone calls that you imagine others are dying to tune in on. For my part, anyone tapping my line will, ninety-nine times out of 100, hear me hanging up on a telemarketer who has just addressed me as Mr. Potsky.

Those who are vehemently opposed to the government’s collecting phone numbers and the length of calls will often point out that so far as we know, not a single terrorist attack on America has been foiled by the NSA. But it should be obvious that if any had been, the feds wouldn’t go around bragging about it, lest the bad guys tracked down and eliminated the weak link in their communication system.

More to the point, although a great many Americans have been harassed by the IRS, the EPA and the Justice Department, under Obama, no citizen has come forward to state that his privacy has been intruded upon by the NSA. And we all know that if anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights had been violated, the NY Times would have splashed the news across its front page and Rand Paul would have highlighted it during one of his weekly filibusters.

None of this should be taken as an endorsement of Obama and his approach to national security. So far, after six years in office, he has shown that the only use he has for the military is as a prop when he occasionally addresses the cadets at West Point or when he wants to do battle with Ebola or global warming.

Many pundits have pointed out that Obama has no strategy when it comes to fighting those who are massacring Christians, women and children, in the Middle East and North Africa and who have sworn to kill Americans. That’s not true. He has a strategy. It’s called non-engagement.

Like most liberals, he is opposed to warfare and despises those who wear the uniform. Like John Kerry, who dismissed those in the military as people too dumb to go to college, Obama hates people who wear guns to work, unless, of course, they’re protecting his sorry ass. It helps to explain his contempt for cops and for those of us who support them.

Some people believe his mantra of “No boots on the ground” is because he’s a Muslim or at least sympathetic to them. But he is equally unwilling to confront Putin’s aggression. Does anyone think it’s because he’s Russian Orthodox and was born in Minsk?

If anyone is going to oppose the barbarians, Obama wants the Saudis, the Qataris and the Jordanians, to do it. But as we’ve seen in Iraq, that doesn’t work out too well. At the first sign of ISIS, the Iraqi forces we’ve been training for a dozen years, turned tail and ran. If we have reason to fear ISIS or Iran, for that matter, we should stop relying on cut-throats and back-stabbers to do our killing for us, and we should forget about nation-building. We used to think that nobody could be worse than the likes of Gadhafi, Mubarak, Hussein and the Shah of Iran. But those creeps knew how to keep the Islamic radicals in line, and we now realize that those were the good old days.

The problems with our jobbing out the fighting to Arabs and Muslims is, one, we can’t tell our friends from our enemies and, two, they not only run, but they leave our weapons behind to be used by our foes. It’s like a weird kind of Middle East quiz show, where the parting gifts consist of American trucks, tanks and artillery.

I hate Obama, but let’s face it, the schmuck didn’t vote for himself 70 million times. For the past 240 years, our military has protected us from our mortal enemies. But in the end, it couldn’t protect us from ourselves.

Most of us look at Detroit and we see the inevitable result of decades of liberal leadership. It is what always happens when millions of people sign up to be dependents of the city, state and federal, governments, eager to surrender their backbones and their votes in exchange for a welfare check. Most of us look at Detroit and feel compassion or disgust or a combination of the two. Baltimore, however, looks at Detroit and the message seems to be “If they can do it, we can do it.”

One is accustomed to hearing that practice makes perfect, but Congress continues to disprove that notion. All they do all day is vote, but they are obviously as bad at it as those of us who only vote every few years. But the louts we vote for are essentially only running against one other person, limiting our choices to either a Republican or a Democrat.

But what possible excuse do these people have for electing and re-electing the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner? On the face of it, the four of them have nothing to recommend them for leadership positions. They are all physically unattractive and, even when reading scripts, are deadly dull and unpersuasive. And yet their colleagues keep selecting them to be the face and voice of their respective parties.

In other news, while addressing the Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C.. recently, Obama said, “Earlier this week, I was actually interviewed by one of your members, Jeff Goldberg, and he reminded me that he once called me ‘the first Jewish President.’ Now, since some people still seem to be wondering about my faith, I should make clear this was an honorary title. But I was flattered.”

Inasmuch as even in 2012, roughly 70% of the Jewish vote went to Obama in spite of his pandering to Iran, his refusal to take up arms against the Muslims or even to identify Islam as the existential enemy of Israel and the U.S. — and that the Jews at the Synagogue gave him a number of standing ovations — there’s no question he deserves the title. But, speaking as a Jew, it’s hardly flattering.

The art world, being what it is, it’s not the least bit surprising that the latest sensation is an artist-vandal named Katsu who, working in the medium of feces, has been painting the likes of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It seems to me that in a rational world, he would be commissioned to start painting presidential portraits.