There’s a very 2001 feel to President Barack Obama’s request for authorization to use military force and the nauseating sense that we’ll be at war indefinitely.

You’d think Alabama would learn. And to be fair, many Alabamans have. It’s just that Judge Roy Moore is not one of them. He’s the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Last week he ordered the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

His defense secretary says “the world is exploding all over.” His attorney general says that the threat of terror “keeps me up at night.” Yet President Barack Obama’s reaction to, shall we say, turmoil abroad has been one of alarming lassitude and passivity.

Presidents have become avatars in the culture war being fought across the Internet and the airwaves, and nothing gives secular liberal journalists more of a buzz than exposing the alleged backwardness of those they consider backward. It’s a cultural wedge issue used by the very people who claim they hate cultural wedge issues.

The rapidity of progress by the gay rights movement — from Stonewall to likely Supreme Court vindication of gay marriage in a historical blink — is causing a series of social and legal tensions.

At the end of the newscast — or the story or column — what matters most in journalism is credibility and public trust, both of which have suffered in recent years. It isn’t only that news delivery has become more slanted as partisanship displaces objectivity, but that high-profile individuals and institutions have squandered trust in pursuit of something other than truth.

What did the Islamic State think it could possibly gain by burning alive a captured Jordanian pilot? To destabilize Jordan by drawing it deeply into the conflict.

I don’t know when the mania for Secret Knowledge began. Maybe it was when “The X-Files” fed a shivering unease that we inhabited a world of lies within lies. But the fact that it’s here is beyond dispute. Indeed, it has spread like, well … measles.

It is perverse that Obama feels compelled to lecture the West about not getting too judgmental on our “high horse” about radical Islam’s medieval barbarism in 2015 because of Christianity’s medieval barbarism in 1215. It’s also insipidly hypocritical.

Sen. Rand Paul’s statements, particularly on vaccinations, reveal the unexplored depths of a highly ideological and conspiratorial worldview. He is one of the most consistently interesting presidential candidates. But he is likely to be interesting in self-destructive ways.

On the bright side, the far left and the far right finally have found common ground. They’d rather let their children risk illness — and their country an epidemic — than contaminate their offspring’s pristine bodies with antibodies.

Marissa Alexander has endured a nightmarish odyssey through the Florida injustice system ever since the day in August 2010 that she got into a fight with her husband.

Amid the ritual expressions of regret and the pledges of “never again” on last week’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a bitter irony was noted: Anti-Semitism has returned to Europe. With a vengeance.

Have you heard about the secret conspiracy between the Saudis and the White House? I haven’t either, probably because there isn’t one. But events are playing out exactly as one would expect if such a conspiracy existed.

In our politics, ideological assertions tend to gain an immediate, massive velocity. It is not enough to raise questions about global warming; it must be (according to Sen. James Inhofe) the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” It is not sufficient to call for improved control of the border; immigrant children may be carriers of Ebola (as Rep. Phil Gingrey once asserted). It is zero to 100 in no time flat.