THIS DOES SEEM TO BE THE CASE: “America is in the grip of a crisis, namely a shortage of normal people.”

THE WASHINGTON POST’S FACT CHECKER doesn’t read the Washington Post.

It’s like you can’t trust “fact check” columnists to actually check facts.

BARACK OBAMA: The Media Needs To Go To War! And Tom Maguire does, though perhaps not quite as our President anticipated. “After all, two million Parisians were not killed in the Friday night attacks. So when a guy with Secret Service protection tells you not to be afraid, listen up.”

Plus: “In any case – There was a time when dissent was the highest from of patriotism, or so progressives told us. Its almost as if that was partisan BS.”

CHANGE: Argentina Votes Evita’s Heirs Out of Office. “Argentina’s election on Sunday represented the starkest choice the country has faced since the authoritarian era of Juan and Evita Peron began in the 1940s. The seven-point victory of center-right candidate Mauricio Macri may herald a real shift towards more sensible economics and less anti-U.S. policies in Latin America. Defeated Peronist candidate Daniel Scioli was a hand-picked defender of the interventionist economics of his party’s retiring President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner.”

“Interventionist economics” is a synonym for “increased opportunities for graft.”

AS YOU SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP: The Boy Boycott.

SULTAN KNISH: Obama Wants to Defeat America, Not ISIS. “Obama’s failed wars occupy a space of unreality that most Americans associate with Baghdad Bob bellowing that there are no American soldiers in Iraq. (There are, according to the White House, still no American ground forces in Iraq. Only American forces in firefights on the ground in Iraq.) There’s nothing new about any of this. Obama doesn’t win wars. He lies about them.”

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Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Winter is coming.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO A LEFTY: HATING THE RIGHT PEOPLE. Bette Midler: ‘Caitlyn may be a woman – but she’s still a Republican.’

FLASHBACK: Trump indicts America’s ruling class: His rise is a symptom of an increasingly isolated and tyrannical elite.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: After Paris: Where’s Our Fire? “The problem here isn’t those much-feared ‘ordinary people’. The good citizens of Paris, through getting on with life pretty much as it had been before the massacres, have demonstrated the everyday human dignity that separates these inhabitants of a democratic republic from the self-styled representatives of a death-cultist state. No, the problem is Europe’s political class and opinion-forming set, whose instinct after Paris has been to police the public’s response to it, and to water down anything even remotely resembling a passionate, proud, nationalistic or simply strong-willed reaction.”

Well, that sort of thing might interfere with opportunities for graft.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Labor Department throws football party, but bans Redskins jerseys.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! (CONT’D): Body camera helps discredit accusation against Knox deputy. “This allegation was said to have taken place at the side of the vehicle. Prior to body cameras, we would have had no video at the side of the vehicle. We are very pleased with what we have right now.”

I’ve praised Knox County Sheriff Jimmie Jones for adopting body cameras before, but I’m sure his deputies are glad he did it now.

TWEET OF THE DAY, PROFESSIONAL COURTESY IS IMPORTANT EDITION: “On a lighter note, [Italy’s] La Stampa daily reported that a gang of masked robbers had stormed into a bank shouting: ‘Relax, we are not Isis. It is only a hold-up.’”

Heh, indeed.™

HE’S RIGHT: Trump says he’d bring back waterboarding. Good for him for clinging to his common sense.  It isn’t “torture,” as the President’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded in a well-reasoned legal memo back in 2002. The “torture” label is (as usual) just a liberal/progressive subjective conclusion, not an actual legal argument.

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THE LEFT, THIS PAST WEEK: Mister, we could use a sensible Republican like George W. Bush again!

The left today: ZOMG, Donald Trump supports waterboarding!!!!1!!1!!!!!

File under: “Be careful what you wish for.”

SCIENCE: Alcohol As A Sex Enhancer. As always, it depends on the dose.

YEP: Europe is battling ISIS (and Russia) with wimpy defense budgets.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: After Death, Nevada Issues Cryotherapy Guidelines. None of these guidelines sound like they would have prevented the death in question, though, which is sadly typical.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Paul Rahe, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge (Yale Library of Military History).

WELL, IT’S NOT THE “RADICAL JIHAD” STATE, YOU KNOW:  Rex Murphy writes in the Canadian National Post about Hillary Clinton’s doublespeak hypocrisy:

It’s an odd world. Glamour magazine recently named the former Bruce Jenner as its Woman of the Year. In all respectable circles, she is of course now recognized as Caitlyn Jenner, after coming out as a woman. In this context, coming out is simply to be understood as an act of self-declaration. If a person self-identifies as X, Y or Z, then he, she, ze or hir has to be what he, she, ze or hir professes to be. If it’s a nightmare for grammarians, just think of the chaos in biology departments. .  . .

This is a Euclidean axiom in the new geometry of gender and progressive thought. Names matter — what people are called, and what they themselves wish to be called, matters greatly. So if Jenner says “call me Caitlyn,” Hillary will not oppose the right-thinking baptism. . . .

ISIL is of course Islamic, and it is radical by any definition of that weary word. The president of France, François Hollande, declared war on radical Islam in the wake of its multiple ambushes on Paris’ defenceless citizens. He recognizes it for what it says it is — radical, Islamic and terroristic.

Yet in a debate on this very subject, Clinton refused to utter the phrase radical Islam, pushed vigorously against the idea of naming Islamic terror for what it is, even though ISIL itself wears its radical Islamist motivations, goals and methods with arrogant pride.

On Jenner’s right to call herself what she wants, Clinton is on board. On a fanatic organization brutalizing the Middle East and exporting terror to the capitals of the world, she declines.

She is one with U.S. President Barack Obama on this — they steadfastly refuse to call our enemies by their name. In other words, when it comes to words and concepts that correspond to unalterable reality, she will deny words their meaning to the point of refusing to say them. But on matters that Glamour magazine takes seriously, on which DNA itself has spoken, Clinton is one with all the buzz factories of trendy thought.

She was, it must be noted, for four years the secretary of state of the most powerful country on Earth, and now wishes to be its president. Heaven help us.

Amen. ISIL stands for the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” not the “Radical Jihad State of Iraq and the Levant,” which Clinton, Obama and the other P.C. Democrats seem to think it is. Geez.

Besides, why do Clinton and the Democrats think they need to further clarify matters by prefixing the word “radical” in front of “jihad”? Jihad alone isn’t radical enough?

While the term “jihad” can refer to the struggle to maintain Islamic faith, it also (more commonly) refers to a Holy War against non-Islamists. Either way, “jihad” is an exclusionary term, reflecting a religious zeal that is highly intolerant, and possibly quite violent. Under either definition of jihad, it seems pretty “radical” to me.

Liberals/progressives defend Islam so vigorously that they insist on qualifying “jihad” with the adjective “radical,” and they refuse to utter the (accurate) phrase “radical Islam.” How ironic that these liberals/progressives–who repeatedly evince an overt hostility to religion, and who wave the banner of “tolerance” in our faces, to the point of aggression–are so deeply committed to defending such intolerant, religiously motivated actions and beliefs.

CHINA’S “GHOST CITIES.” But I totally believe their economic data.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: What Paris Tells Us.

It hardly needs stating, also, that the Islamist terrorists are as brutal to those Muslims who aren’t of a hardline Salafi creed as they are to non-Muslim infidels. . . .

The West — Europe, in particular —is in a terrifying bind, for it has living in its midst substantial populations of Muslims, the majority of whom are poorly integrated into Western society. And by integration I don’t simply mean a case of Abdul or Cherif or Aicha getting up every morning to go to work with other citizens of Belgium or France or Denmark, but an embracing of the civic and social and constitutional values of these countries — what might, by useful shorthand, be called the Western “way of life”.

To the extent that we have the full facts, we know that every single perpetrator of the carnage in Paris was home-grown. That is a chilling fact (and phrase), conjuring visions of a venom that eats away at the body-politic, with echoes of a cancer in the human body. The fault, I fear, is that of Europe’s elites. For decades, they ignored — and even actively worked against — integration, scorning it as unfashionable, old-fangled, and, worst of all, racist. Is Our Way, they asked, with impressively self-destructive hubris, really better than Their Way?

That question now has an answer. It’s an answer the West must live and, increasingly, die with.

All these eggs keep being broken, but the promised omelettes never appear. . . .

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 927.