Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

No sense of responsibility? Yeah, like the duty to tell the truth. Consider these whoppers from recent years:

• Under my health care plan, “you will be able to keep your doctor;” or
• More than 90 percent of all crime guns in Mexico “come from the United States,” many of them from “gun shops” that line our shared border; or,
• My administration is going to be “accountable” and “transparent,” so the American people’s interests are being “well served.”

That last promise comes from Barack Obama’s first day in office. It kind of rings hollow today, however, now that Obama’s Justice Department appears to be in the midst of a massive cover-up.

That’s because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) — the bureaucracy charged with jurisdiction over gun stores — has been cracking down on federal agents who are blowing the whistle on abuses committed within the agency.

The murder of federal agent Brian Terry in December exposed a trail of government corruption, where the ATF was working with gun shops, approving firearms purchases to buyers who were suspected smugglers.

Of course, one wonders why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg never talks about this. He’s the one who made headlines recently when he employed a team of undercover investigators to ferret out gun dealers who were supposedly willing to bend the law and make sales to questionable characters.

A CBS News report, however, shows a completely different picture. It shows gun dealers actually trying to prevent the sales of guns from going to suspected bad guys.

CBS has reported that several gun shops “wanted to stop the questionable sales, but ATF encouraged them to continue.” ATF special agent John Dodson tells CBS that he and fellow agents were under orders to “intentionally [let] guns go to Mexico.”

This is quite ironic since the Obama administration has repeatedly stated that we are to blame for much of Mexico’s crime problems. Never mind the fact that Mexico has very strict gun control laws — which not only keep their law-abiding citizens completely disarmed, but turn them into mandatory victims.

And never mind the fact that the ATF has been allowing US guns to “walk” across the border — not to those law-abiding Mexicans who need protection, but to dangerous drug cartels.

Fox News was the first agency to conduct an investigation and show that, in actuality, less than one-fifth — not 90 percent — of the guns confiscated in Mexico originated in the United States.

Further to that, CBS News reported recently that as far back as 2008, the ATF has been watching guns flow into Mexico, even while telling American gun dealers to shelve their apprehensions about selling those firearms to suspected dealers.

Hey, that means the ATF was helping send guns into Mexico long before the President blamed our Second Amendment for fueling Mexico’s violence!

Imagine that. A lack of transparency, even from someone who promised us that his administration was going to be different.