“Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.” —Barack Obama, Sept. 10, 2014. From the same speech: “If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States.”

“Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.” —CIA Director John Brennan, June 20, 2016

“We are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again and we are not putting ground troops into Syria. We’re going to defeat ISIS without committing American ground troops.” —Hillary Clinton, Sept. 6, 2016

“I’m the only candidate in this race who has been part of the hard decisions to take terrorists off the battlefield. … I’m grateful to have support and advice from a wide range of bipartisan national security leaders who’ve worked with both Democratic and Republican presidents. When we met together earlier this month in New York, one of the points they emphasized was the need to support state and local law enforcement, who act as our first line of defense.” —Hillary Clinton, Sept. 19, 2016

It is now indisputable that Democrats and their feckless standard-bearers will abide two realities that ought to terrify every American. First, they will continue to insist an accelerated air campaign coupled with outsourcing a ground offensive absolutely necessary to achieve genuine victory against the Islamic State is the best they can do, utterly irrespective of our allies’ willingness or capability to abide that strategy. They will do so, despite the reality it’s been two years since Obama articulated the same strategy, and as his own CIA director indicated, it is a proven failure.

That proven failure has allowed the Islamic State to remain a viable fighting force, and just as important, if not more so, a highly effective propaganda and recruitment machine.

This willingness to abide a failed strategy and ongoing ISIL viability brings us to reality number two: Democrats have ultimately concluded that a reasonable level of domestic terror — think Boston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Seaside Heights, and New York City (again) — is the price all of us must pay to maintain their contemptible agenda.

In short, Americans will continue to fight and die on our own soil to preserve political correctness.

That is why a clueless Hillary Clinton can refer to state and local law enforcement as “our first line of defense.” No, Mrs. Clinton. They are our last line of defense after a PC-addled FBI again dropped the ball like it did with the Boston Marathon-bombing Tsarnaev brothers, Fort Hood jihadi Nidal Hasan, and Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen. After the immigration floodgates have been opened, and the “refugee” vetting process has been reduced from 18-24 months to three months. After the Obama administration has “mistakenly” granted citizenship to at least 1,982 individuals who pose security risks. After the president has made it one of his chief priorities to close Guantanamo Bay, even as many of the “worst of the worst” formerly imprisoned there have returned to the battlefield. And after it was revealed the Obama administration made wire transfer payments to the Iranian government, completely contradicting the president’s assertion — made during a press conference where Obama revealed he had given the mullahs $400 million in cash — that such transfers were legally impossible.

In a better nation, giving money to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror would be an impeachable offense. In this one, it is “racist” to say so.

Even worse, to connect the words “Islam” and “terror” in any shape or form is to engage in the “deplorable” practice of “Islamophobia.” So much so, Ahmad Khan Rahami, the chief suspect in the New York and New Jersey bombings, filed a lawsuit against police in Elizabeth, NJ, claiming they subjected him and his family to discrimination and “selective enforcement” based on their religion. It was dismissed with prejudice in 2012, meaning the plaintiff is forbidden from filing another lawsuit based on the same grounds.

Four years later a plaintiff is an alleged bomber.

The mother of Rahami’s daughter also debunked the leftist shibboleth that asserts immigrants coming to America should “celebrate their differences.” She described him as a deadbeat father who disliked American culture and despised homosexuals. Yet she was surprised at this turn of events. “I never thought he would do something like this,” she said while crying. “I think he was brainwashed.”

If so, he wasn’t the first to be indoctrinated — and he won’t be the last. Not as long as the American electorate abides a Democrat Party willing to slow-walk a war they refuse to admit we’re in, against Islamic terrorists they refuse to define as such.

Moreover, Rahami’s not the only one who’s been “conditioned” by a terror war Democrats would rather manage than win. “The black-and-white image that caught Ahmad Khan Rahami near the site of a Manhattan explosion Saturday night and helped investigators identify him as a bombing suspect comes from one of more than 8,000 cameras added to New York streets since the September 11 terror attacks as part of the city’s ‘Ring of Steel,’” NBC News reported.

That so-called Ring of Steel is enhanced by biological and chemical sensors, radiation sensors, shot-spotter sensors that detect gunfire, license plate readers and crime databases as well as a “Dashboard” system that gets alerts on unattended packages, stolen vehicles traveling on tunnels and bridges, and suspicious odors of hazardous materials.

In short, New Yorkers have abided the creation of a de facto police state in lieu of eliminating Islamist terror.

And make no mistake: It was nothing more than ineptitude or a lack of expertise on the part of the alleged bomber that has allowed Obama, Clinton, the Democrat Party and their media enablers to continue framing the terror threat in theoretical terms, exemplified by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s moronic assertion that we are in a “narrative battle” against the Islamic State, and their claim of association with Islam is “a mythology” the Obama administration is successfully “debunking.” Imagine selling that to a nation mourning scores of dead and mutilated Americans victimized by three successive attacks in Seaside Park, Manhattan and Elizabeth in two days.

Ring of Steel? Ghost town is more like it, followed by a massive hit to the local economy.

The nation is at an inflection point. Either we choose to pursue a war against Islamic terror where it originates — one so decisively brutal and uncompromising that the only “narrative” arising from it is that allegiance to ISIL is a de facto death sentence — or we continue to endure the emerging New Normal of domestic attacks likely to increase in tempo, and deadly efficiency. We either realize that war weariness is an unaffordable luxury, or embrace a Ring of Steel mentality that still required a measure of dumb luck to prevent further carnage.

Terror attacks on American soil are not “debunked narratives.” They are epitome of a bankrupt progressive ideology that serves political correctness first, and national security last. That too is an unaffordable luxury. One the electorate should thoroughly repudiate in November.