Hillary Clinton might be scrambling on to Bill O’Reilly’s phone lines to burnish her terrorist-fighting credentials today, haunted by visions of cratering poll numbers, but she was singing a very different tune about Islam last November:

“Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 19, 2015

Clinton’s comments came during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, during which the former Secretary of State actually mocked the words “radical Islamic terrorism,” as if the idea was figment of the hellish Republican imagination.

Clinton claimed that using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe the previous radical Islamic terrorist attack in France — the Paris massacre, which occurred just a few days before she spoke — “gives these criminals, these murderers, more standing than they deserve, and it actually plays into their hands by alienating partners we need by our side.”

“In the end it didn’t matter what kind of terrorist we called [Osama] bin Laden. It mattered that we killed bin Laden,” Clinton sniffed.

By June, Clinton had grown uncomfortable enough with public perceptions of her terrorist-fighting credentials to assure a CNN audience that she was super-duper comfortable with saying the words “radical Islam.” Never mind all that silly garbage that was flowing across her teleprompter at the Council on Foreign Relations! If “radical Islam” are the magic words that will get her into the White House, then Hillary Clinton was ready to say them.

“From my perspective, it matters what we do more than what we say. And it mattered we got bin Laden, not what name we called him. I have clearly said we – whether you call it radical jihadism or radical Islamism, I’m happy to say either. I think they mean the same thing,” she said, making a game effort to keep her we got bin Laden without calling him a jihadi talking point alive.

However, when she made her desperate call to Bill O’Reilly after the Nice atrocity unfolded, she was suddenly uncomfortable with the “radical Islam” formulation again, going with “these radical jihadist groups” instead. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton could tell us about some moderate jihadist groups, for the purposes of comparison.

The point of all this — which Clinton, Barack Obama, and just about every other Democrat is ideologically incapable of grasping — is that it’s not just a word game. “Radical Islamic terrorism” is not a meaningless label randomly attached to certain crimes. There is nothing else like the jihadi threat in the world today, but Democrats are absolutely determined to pretend otherwise, and they care very little about the risk to American national security caused by their politics.

It’s not just that Clinton and Obama go into convulsions when someone asks them about the motivation behind these horrific attacks. It’s that American intelligence and law enforcement people are being forced to share the Democrats’ willful blindness. They’re forbidden to use the words, or study the concepts behind them, and it exposes the American people to horrible risk — mitigated primarily by the willingness of dedicated federal and state law enforcement personnel to ignore the Democrats’ orders. Lives are being saved by the national security community’s quiet defiance of political correctness.

If we’re going to get serious about understanding our enemies, so we can find their weaknesses, then fighting and defeating this enemy, instead of simply getting used to them as a chronic problem that never goes away — which is the core principle of what passes for Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy — then we need to sweep out every last remnant of this disastrous administration, and replace them with serious people.

That will never happen under the current Democrat Party, especially Barack Obama’s designated successor Hillary Clinton. Hers is the sort of mindset that leads governments to conceal the details of jihadi horror from their Islamophobic citizens, because the rubes might panic and vote for “right-wing” leadership if they knew the truth.