COLUMN: Changing the rules on refugees - Are you surprised?

See if you recognize the irony in the following statement: “If I didn’t know better, I would think that our government was out to get us.”

Fact is, the more you know, the less you trust the government. People who trust the government are tools of the government. Their trust allows them to be spun like cotton candy.

People who question the government are targets of the government. (Remember the IRS attack on conservative organizations under the Obama administration?)

The tools of the government unfortunately seem to outnumber the watchdogs lately, which means that the government has largely been able to do whatever it wants to do, and what it wants to do more and more seems to be to crush the American spirit.

Case in point: The current maneuver to deploy Syrian refugees into isolated communities scattered throughout the American homeland. There is no way to understand this except as a concerted effort to turn the phrase “homeland security” into an oxymoron. The American people know this, but the U.S. government seems to be more concerned about what the UN thinks than what its own citizens think.

Of course, the American people have been told that we have a humanitarian responsibility to accept refugees into our borders, and we have been assured that the government will protect us by diligently vetting the refugees and making sure no bad guys get through.

Yeah, that’s nice, except this is the same government that diligently vets illegal immigrants before releasing them back on the street to murder and rape innocent Americans on a regular basis. If you don’t know the story of Kate Steinle, read about it now. She and thousands of other innocent people have been killed, maimed and assaulted by immigrants who were allowed to remain in our country by our ever-vigilant government.

Remember, this is the same government that allowed the Tsarnaev brothers into the country to blow up innocent men, women and children at the Boston Marathon. This is the same government that allowed Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik into the country to shoot and kill 14 of their co-workers during a Christmas party in San Bernardino.

So why would intelligent, informed Americans ever question their government’s ability to protect them from Syrian refugees?

Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester certainly doesn’t doubt it. Back in November, he reassured a Montana broadcast audience that “as far as Syrian refugees go, they go through a vetting process that takes 18 months to two years. It is very extensive ... we have to make sure all these folks pass a rigorous test before they can get in here, to make sure they’re not terrorists.”

Bottom line for Sen. Tester: “We need to approach this [refugee crisis] from a common sense standpoint, not a knee-jerk reaction standpoint and move forward.” You can pretty much tune out all the rest of the message and cut to the chase: “We need to ... move forward” with accepting Syrian refugees in the United States and place them in our homeland communities.

Communities like Missoula, Montana, where the non-governmental International Rescue Committee has been authorized to begin resettling up to 100 refugees over a period of 12 months. Of course, because this is a “free country,” we feel no obligation to monitor the thoughts and actions of people who live among us, so once those refugees are here, all we can do to protect ourselves is hope and pray they do not harbor sympathy for Islamic terror ideals. Beyond that, we are at their mercy.

Of course, there are a few sane voices in the government struggling to protect the nation against what seems like an intentional plan to de-stabilize the homeland. Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana has brought attention to the fact that the Obama administration’s promise that refugees would be extensively vetted for up to two years has been sliced and diced down to three months.

Maybe this has something to do with President Obama’s impending departure from the White House, and the realization that if he wants to bring Syrian refugees into places like Missoula, he has very little time to do so. Thus, an Associated Press story in Friday’s Inter Lake talked about a “surge operation” to expedite refugee processing.

Too bad President Obama didn’t support the surge operation in Iraq when President Bush was trying to crush the Islamic army that later morphed into the Islamic State. But the idea that we need a “surge” of refugees into the United States from a part of the world where violence is second nature is absurd.

As Zinke pointedly said, “President Obama has once again misled the American people and members of Congress in order to get his way. Obama and his Democrat allies in Congress have proven they will use bait and switch tactics to move more unvetted refugees into our communities. This will inevitably put our nation and our citizens at risk for future terrorist attacks.”

Zinke, who has extensive experience in the Middle East as a former Navy SEAL, co-sponsored the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act, which passed the House overwhelmingly last year and then got stalled by Senate Democrats. This legislation would have required the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to jointly determine that each and every refugee admitted to the United States is not a security threat.

The problem is, for most of those refugees, you can’t do it. The director of the FBI and the director of Homeland Security have admitted to Congress that in large measure there is no reliable database of Syrians that can be checked to determine who is a real refugee and who is an Islamic State soldier. Add to that the known fact that the Islamic State has printed thousands of authentic Syrian passports and handed them out to fighters, and you have a catastrophe waiting to happen.

And next time, it may not be a catastrophe that costs 14 people their lives, or even 130 people such as died in the savage Paris terror attacks. Information gathered in police raids following the Brussels bombings has confirmed what everyone should have already known. ISIS is working to gain the means of acquiring nuclear material in order to set off a dirty bomb that could kill potentially thousands of people.

Nor is that the final step in the terrorists’ plans to destroy the West. With nuclear weapons in the hands of Pakistan and North Korea, and soon Iran, it is just a matter of time before the Islamic State acquires one. At that point, the absurdity of allowing potential terrorists to infiltrate our country will become abundantly clear — but if the past is any indication, that clarity will dissipate in a fog of political correctness much sooner than the fallout from a nuclear explosion will settle.