“I can give assurances to the public in Europe and around the world that we’re not going around snooping at people’s e-mails or listening to their phone calls,” Obama said. “What we try to do is target very specifically areas of concern.”

President Obama said these words in Stockholm, at a news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Reinfeldt. At home, he dishes this deceitful pablum out to American citizens by the shovelful. He seems to believe it. Then he rolls the same kind of statements out to the rest of the world, and expects people to believe it because he sounds so sincere! Or perhaps he thinks people believe it because everyone is grinning at him.

The issue isn’t whether the U. S. government “snoops at people’s e-mails or listens to their phone calls.” The issue is whether we have a government that follows its own laws. Note that President Obama never says, “We observe the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure.” That falsehood is so incredible, it would garner too much ridicule. So he opts for the sly, pernicious prevarication we’ve come to expect from our president.

Now for that extra statement that we “target very specifically areas of concern.” How specific are your targets when you have to build a huge server farm out in the desert to store all the data you have collected? NSA carefully limits its targets. It collects communications data only for people who live on this planet.

Mr. Obama, we’ve had enough of your mendacity here at home. Don’t go abroad and spread the same manure in Europe. It’s just embarrassing.