The Germans are in a frenzy over the disclosure that the National Security Agency (NSA) tapped Angela Merkel’s private telephone, along with the telephones of three-dozen other world leaders. It’s an embarrassment of the second magnitude, and all Barack Obama knows about it is what he reads in the newspapers. “Senior government officials” tell The Wall Street Journal that the spooks didn’t tell the president about the wiretaps “because it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.” (He was working on his hook shot and couldn’t be disturbed.) It’s hard to imagine that the Germans believe...