This just in from the always-worth-reading Dr. Thomas Sowell:  Glib ‘Happy Talk.’  Excerpt:

We will be lucky to get through the remainder of President Obama’s term in office without a major catastrophe, from which we may or may not recover.

Iran has announced repeatedly that it plans to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. But you don’t need an intercontinental missile to reach Israel from Iran. Tehran is less than a thousand miles from Jerusalem. As was said long ago, “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

It was painfully ironic to hear Ms. Rice tell us that the danger we face today is not as serious as the dangers we faced in World War II.

Anyone who has actually studied the period that led up to World War II knows that the Western democracies followed feckless policies remarkably similar to those that we are following today. And anyone who studies that war itself knows that the West came dangerously close to losing it before finally getting their act together and turning things around.

In a nuclear age, we may not have time to let reality finally sink in on our leaders and wake up the public to the dangers.

It is perhaps belaboring the obvious that Dr. Sowell is smarter than anyone – maybe everyone  – on President Obama’s foreign policy staff.

It is also belaboring the obvious to note that there is, protestations of the current Administration aside, a clear, critical and existential to the West in the form of ISIL and their ideological counterparts.  What is not obvious is the Administration’s stubborn refusal to call this threat what it is – Islamic terrorism.

ISIL commits their horrors – burning, beheading, rape, massacre – in the name of Islam.  Al Qaeda likewise.  And the single greatest state sponsor of terror in the world since their 1979 Islamic Revolution?  The Islamic Republic of Iran, with an aggressively Islamist government.

Yes, it is also belaboring the obvious to point out that most Muslims are not terrorists.  But it is also obvious that almost all of the terrorists operating today are Muslims.

That makes the refusal of the Obama Administration to acknowledge the threat that much more baffling.  The civilized world wants these savages destroyed – but we can’t destroy them with half-measures and euphemisms.