Riding a bike around Annapolis, I note that the flags at the Old State House, the Naval Academy, and the library are at half-staff again. This time for Nice, France. Or is it Dallas? Or Baton Rouge? I confess I lose track.

It seems the flags have been at half-staff most of the time since President Obama took office. It also seems the pace of terrorist attacks is picking up.

Secretary of State John Kerry thinks this is proof that ISIS is on the run. How fatuous. That’s rather like saying the German troops marching through the Arc de Triomphe is good news because they’re wearing out their boots!

It was inevitable that President Obama’s administration would not know how to cope with ISIS. They don’t even know what to call it. They incite ISIS attacks by cravenly calling it ISIL.

That acronym means Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. By calling ISIS by its preferred name, ISIL, President Obama is giving diplomatic recognition to this terrorist network’s wild claim that they are sovereign over Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel.

That’s what calling it ISIL means. Some of us conservatives have called ISIS by the first name it used. That’s because we believe it translates as “Islamist Savagery Inspired by Satan.” Beheading nine-year-old girls and burning Jordanian pilots alive qualifies for satanic savagery in our minds.

President Obama’s administration called Nidal Hasan’s murderous shooting spree at Fort Hood “workplace violence” and resisted giving Purple Hearts to wounded survivors. Purple Hearts go to warriors who sustain wounds in the line of duty.

Apparently, the Obama administration does not think we are in a worldwide war on terror. Leon Trotsky said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” You would think this administration would at least bone up on Bolsheviks.

The president thinks we need to address the economic grievances that terrorists exploit. If we get jobs for people in the Mideast, they are less likely to join ISIS, he thinks. Maybe they need an Obama stimulus plan. ISIS has its own idea of a stimulus plan. It’s called rape.

President Obama has deceived us on many things. He said we could keep our doctor and our health plan if we liked them. We can’t. He said he was not negotiating with Iran when, as Ben Rhodes boasted, his administration was doing precisely that.

On one thing, however, President Obama has never deceived us. He admits he “sought out the Marxist professors” in college. He acknowledges attending the Socialist Scholars Conference in Manhattan in 1983. He concedes these things.

Nobody seeks out Marxist professors or goes to socialist conferences unless he is a socialist. The president even joked about this at a White House Correspondents Association dinner. He noted his graying hair and cracked: “I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.” Good joke and a clever non-denial.

If we doubt President Obama’s socialist commitment, we should ask ourselves why he went to Germany in 2008. No candidate for president had ever gone to a foreign capital to kick off his campaign. He told cheering crowds in Berlin -- mostly composed of white socialists -- that he was “a citizen of the world.” That’s a core tenet of Marxism.

Why Germany? Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to their socialist philosophy as “the German ideology” (Die Deutsche Ideologie)  In going to Germany, Barack Obama was not issuing what liberals call “a dog whistle.” That’s the coded messages they say conservatives send to racists. This was no dog whistle; it was a socialist foghorn.

Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin agreed that only when the revolution came to Germany would the socialist international be called a success. By going to Germany before launching his winning campaign at home, Barack Obama was signaling loud and clear: It is coming! It’s why he always claims to be on “the right side of history.” To socialists, historical determinism means their victory is inevitable.

President Obama said in 2008 he wanted to be a transformational president, as President Reagan was a transformational president. He has kept that pledge. His Affordable Care Act (ACA) is in truth the Act for Controlling Americans. It is the cornerstone of socialism in this country and every other country.

Republicans singularly failed, from 1994-2008, to provide us a free-market alternative to ObamaCare. And thus we have fallen into the iron grip of socialism. At home, the government threatens our liberties. At the same time, it defiantly refuses to protect our lives. The only people who fear the U.S. government are citizens of the U.S.

Let the flag fly at half-staff for the rest of President Obama’s term. Let it remind us of the lives lost on his watch. And of our lost liberties, too.