When priorities get out of whack and people lose sight of what really matters, military folks are fond of saying, “We’re pole vaulting over mouse turds.” While it significantly understates the severity of the consequences, the sentiment is appropriate for the Obama administration’s approach to national defense.

On the one hand: The Beltway PC police are hyper-vigilant and will spare no effort or expense for even a perceived threat to one of its protected classes. To wit, the secretary of the Navy has directed that all job titles be rendered gender-neutral. Heaven forbid that one of the females we’ve so recently empowered by sending them to the front lines pause during her assault up the cliffs of the next Normandy to consider whether she’s really up to it because her job description says “infantryman” instead of “infantry person.”

Meanwhile, instead of going to the firing range to hone their marksmanship skills, Marines are sitting through classes to eradicate “unconscious bias” that might lead them to think less of their female counterparts. That’s what passes for liberal logic. Despite “proven science” (and common sense) that indicates they are physiologically ill-suited, women will be forced into some of the most physically (and emotionally) demanding roles imaginable and declared equal warriors. But they’re apparently simultaneously delicate flowers who need protection from unspoken biases of which the alleged bias-holders are not even aware.

On the other hand: The Beltway PC police reflexively refuse to acknowledge that representatives of the Religion of Peace™ — a.k.a., the “JV team” — are inspiring and perpetrating actual physical harm from the cesspool the administration allowed to form in Iraq and Syria.

They follow the commander in chief and protest that we don’t have or need “boots on the ground.” When they are finally forced to concede that we literally do have American service-members’ boots in the soil of Islamic State strongholds like Iraq, Syria and Libya, they claim that they’re merely advisers and trainers and are not participating in “combat.” Once that argument has been proven false, their next defensive position is that the administration has only authorized a limited number of these “trainers and advisors.” Except that this arbitrary cap (notably referred to by the Joint Staff as the Boots on the Ground, or BOG, number) conveniently omits hundreds of “temporary” troops who, as was unfortunately demonstrated by the death of a Marine last week, are in every bit as much danger as their “authorized” counterparts.

Lest the PC police be forced to admit that what Joe Biden referred to as one of his boss’s “greatest achievements” was actually a monumental failure, the administration expends considerably more ink and energy misleading its own citizens and devaluing the service of its military members than figuring out how to defeat a grave threat. Were the consequences not so sobering, it would be ironic and moderately amusing that a Mickey Mouse administration chooses to focus on its own byproducts rather than the real challenges our nation faces.