Barack Obama has declared that the best way to defeat ISIS is not with guns, but by coming up with better ideas. I beg to differ. If you’re ISIS and looking to terrify your enemies and trying to convert sadists to your mission, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better idea than beheading, burning and crucifying, the opposition.

As for Obama, this is the same knucklehead who came up with Cash for Clunkers, Operation Fast & Furious, pushing the reset button with Russia, negotiating with Iran and the Affordable Care Act. If these are the best ideas he can come up with, we really do need to give guns a shot, as it were.

Another of Obama’s brainstorms was to deplete our Army from 570,000 in 2010 to 490,000 in 2014 and now all the way down to 450,000. I suppose this is Obama’s way of letting us know that in spite of what’s happening in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, North Korea and China, we’re safer than ever under his watch.

I don’t know how everyone else feels about it, but I never again want to hear anyone, but especially not a Republican, refer to “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Democrats promised Reagan that in exchange for his signing the amnesty bill in 1986, they would shut down the border.

Naturally, they failed to keep their word. And thanks to a lousy economy, they can now insist that there is barely a trickle of illegals sneaking across the border. But without shutting it down once and for all, once the economy turns around, the trickle will once again turn into a flood.

Until the border is shut down so tightly that not even a Mexican mouse can make it across, everything said on the subject is just an excuse to troll for votes, not to safeguard the nation’s sovereignty.

Speaking of which, if the United States is such a terrible place where every white person is a racist until proven otherwise and every cop is a thug, why do urban blacks continue to hang around? After all, Latin Americans trek hundreds, even thousands of miles, to get here. But all those long-suffering blacks refuse to even consider moving to Canada.

I’m not telling them to leave, you understand, but if I lived in a country that treated me as badly as people like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Eric Holder and Marilyn Mosby, insist is the case, I know I wouldn’t stick around any longer than it would take me to pack.

Even in the wake of Kate Steinle’s being shot to death by Francisco Sanchez, who could easily be the poster boy for illegal alien felons, San Francisco continues to take pride in its status as a sanctuary city. In the meantime, conservative groups continue to display their own lack of conviction by failing to announce they’ve decided to hold their conferences and conventions elsewhere. Why is it that only liberals ever decide to show their pique through the peaceful, but very effective, means of a boycott?

One fascinating aspect of Chavez shooting Ms. Steinle is that, aside from the multitude of times blacks have gunned down other blacks in places like Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore, it marks the very first time that someone has been shot in America and Obama has not called for stricter gun laws.

It’s bad enough that Barack Obama has decided not to prosecute drug crimes, but what imbecile decided that the best way to punish criminals is to deport them to Mexico? Mr. Chavez had already been deported five times. But when your border consists of some invisible line in the sand or the Rio Grande, such a sentence carries the same weight as giving a seven-year-old who’s been acting up a time-out in his bedroom. At most, it’s a temporary inconvenience.

If it were up to me, I would jail the likes of Mr. Chavez and I would charge Mexico for his upkeep. I wouldn’t send El Presidente a bill, which he would simply ignore. Instead, I would deduct it from the foreign aid we send Mexico every year. In addition, I would prevent Western Union and American banks from transferring funds from people in the States to their relatives south of the border.

I have a feeling that in very short order, Mexico would be busy building a wall of its own at the border.

In the wake of a piece I wrote calling for an end to “Innocent by reason of insanity,” a judgment that serves no other purpose than to treat some murderers, rapists and child molesters, more leniently than others, someone suggested changing it to “Guilty by reason of insanity.” But, as I wrote back, that doesn’t serve any real purpose. Guilty is guilty, and once you begin modifying it, you wind up in a swamp, up to your neck in linguistic swill like “hate crimes” and “social justice.”

Recently, while watching Hillary Clinton being tossed softballs by some liberal lobber on CNN, it occurred to me that in spite of having had decades of practice, Mrs. Clinton remains a really terrible liar. In poker circles, a “tell” is the subconscious sign that a player is trying to run a bluff. In Hillary Clinton’s case, the tipoff is that she opens her eyes very wide, trying to mimic sincerity, and speaks emphatically than usual. The other “tell,” of course, is that her lips are moving.

The NY Times decided to leave Ted Cruz’s book, “A Time for Truth,” off its list of best sellers, although it out-sold other books that made the list. When questioned, the Times explained that their criteria take more than actual sales into account. Perhaps, that being the case, they could change the title of the section to “Best Sellers Written by People with Whose Politics We Happen to Be in Accord.”

When I recently wrote my low opinion of Abe Lincoln, stating that, having been responsible for the deaths of 750,000 Americans, his nickname shouldn’t have been “Honest Abe,” it should have been “Bloody Abe,” I expected some readers to spring to his defense. Instead, I heard from about a dozen people who agreed with me. That should teach me to never underestimate my readers.

They all acknowledged that his primary concern wasn’t the abolition of slavery, but the preservation of the Union, whatever the cost in other people’s lives.

But as it took the deaths of 750,000 young Americans, a number representing nearly three percent of the total population, I believe that only a Stalin, a Hitler or a Mao, would argue that preservation was worth the cost.

To me, the South’s desire to secede is like a wife who wants a divorce. But instead of granting it, the brutal husband beats her to within an inch of her life, turning her into an invalid, and, for good measure, murders most of their kids.

In the aftermath, making it even worse, historians and other assorted pinheads have gone around saying what a great guy he was.

Finally, Bruce Jenner is facing a lawsuit because his reckless driving on Pacific Coast Highway resulted in the death of another driver. I understand he’s come up with a novel defense, blaming it all on Caitlyn, insisting: “Everyone knows women are terrible drivers!”