“OBAMA TAPS NEW CZAR FOR ISIS FIGHT,” The Hill reports, apparently with a straight face:

President Obama is tapping a new official to help oversee the multinational coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Retired Marine Gen. John Allen is stepping down as envoy and will be replaced by diplomat Brett McGurk.

Funny, I don’t recall too many diplomats being ordered to lead the battle against National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II; additionally, it makes you wonder how we managed to win that war at all without a full contingent of “Czars:”

And you have to wonder how much McGurk actually wants his new job. Or as Mark Steyn wrote a decade ago in “It’s Demography, Stupid” his New Criterion/Wall Street Journal magnum opus article that served as the dry run for America Alone:

The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society — government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity — “Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.

Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.

In the era of ObamaCare, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if our would-be new “ISIS Czar” did.