Obama to Germans about NSA spying: Trust me

Angela Merkel and Barack Obama hold joint press conference

(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Echoing comments from 2013 in which he told American college students to "reject those voices" which encourage distrust of government, President Obama this week asked the people of Germany to trust his wisdom in letting the NSA get all up in their digital communications business. Speaking in a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he said:

What I would ask would be that the German people recognize that the United States has always been on the forefront of trying to promote civil liberties, that we have traditions of due process that we respect, that we have been a consistent partner of yours in the course of the last 70 years, and certainly the last 25 years, in reinforcing the values that we share. And so occasionally I would like the German people to give us the benefit of the doubt, given our history, as opposed to assuming the worst — assuming that we have been consistently your strong partners and that we share a common set of values. [Techdirt]

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.