[NATIONALREVIEW] One of the reasons Obama elicits so much cynicism outside his cult of personality is that many of us suspect that his rhetoric is just so much marketing for protecting the perks and expanding prerogatives of a bloated administrative state. Real wartime governments are prone to bloat and inefficiency too, but there is at least an ethos that says there is a priority higher than protecting the interests of bureaucrats. When you see a government acting as if taxpayer concerns are a joke and a devotion to limited government is cast as something between illegitimate dissent and paranoid dementia, hearing the head of that government exhort the citizenry to shut up and fall in line is nothing short of infuriating.