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The Federal Bureau of Investigation will recommend that the Justice Department bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton and various of her aides, and soon. The evidence consists of materials that the Bureau has gathered in the course of its months-long investigation of Mrs. Clinton's personal server. The recommendations will come very soon. The charges will consist of some of the following: 1. Improper disclosure or retention of classified information. 2. Destruction of government records. 3. Lying to federal agents. 4. Lying under oath. 5. Obstruction of justice. All the counts are familiar to those of us who have followed the...

I was thumbing through an old magazine over the weekend. It was 47 years old to be exact, and I came across a surprisingly prescient piece entitled wittily, "The Arab, the Jew, and the Pickle." What particularly caught my eye was that the piece was written by me in what is now called The American Spectator. Imagine that. In it, I argued that Israel had no other choice but to resist its enemies. They were all around little Israel and they were hostile to the utmost. Any sign of weakness would put the state of Israel in mortal danger. That...

WASHINGTON -- We are told that our political system here in Washington is "broken." The left and the right do not get along, and usually it is because the right is obdurately partisan. Actually, it is not the political system that is broken. It is much wider than the political system. It is the political culture, that is to say: the politicians, the operatives, the financial supporters and the voters (left and right). It is also the commentators, the reporters, the editors; in a word the media (left and right). The left-wing press sees things one way and reports on...

WASHINGTON -- Here we are again with Hillary Rodham Clinton confronted by charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and general improbity. Such behavior has been going on with her for a long time. Some journalists who today chronicle the charges facing the Clintons were not even born when it all began. For those of us with unflagging memories and abundant experience, it goes back decades. I would date the first official charges of Hillary Clinton's crookedness and reckless disregard for the law to Watergate in 1974 when she improbably served on the Watergate impeachment staff. Her boss then was the...

It turns out that 17 years ago Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was lucky that, at the end of his long pursuit of President Bill Clinton, he could fasten upon a DNA sample left by the president on Monica Lewinsky’s dress to prove that Clinton was lying when he said “I did not have sexual relations with woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Otherwise Starr might still be pursuing the wily ex-president. Read more at http://spectator.org/articles/62626/clinton-cash-and-clinton-corruption

WASHINGTON -- Regarding last week's string of stories about Hillary Clinton conducting her State Department business between 2009 and 2013 exclusively on a private email account, the heat -- as we say here in Washington -- is on in the kitchen. Her account was completely controlled by her. Even the server was controlled by her. She apparently had no State Department account when she was secretary of state, and no one thought to ask about it until late in 2014 when a Congressional committee inquiring into the bloody assault on our complexes in Benghazi sought her emails. Yet now the...

WASHINGTON -- It is the end of the year 2014 and the beginning of 2015. Perhaps it is an appropriate time to think about what we are to be confronted with in the presidential year 2016. Ever since the autumn electoral rout of the Democrats, we have been confronted by news stories of the looming presidential prospects of Hillary Rodham Clinton and hints about the rise of the presidential prospects of Elizabeth Warren. Only rarely is there a news story about the presidential prospects of the Republicans, though I count more than 25 possible Republican candidates. On the Democrats side...

WASHINGTON -- In the gloom of the day after last week's election I think even his allies in the media expected something more from the Prophet Barack Obama. After all, he had just suffered through a wave election and he was left soaking wet. He did not merely lose this wave election. He was swamped. Republicans were victorious practically everywhere. At times they won by double digits: Senator Mitch McConnell won by 15 points, Arkansas' Senator-elect Tom Cotton by 17 points. And forget not the governorships: Ohio's John Kasich by 31 points, South Carolina's Nikki Haley by 15 points. The...

WASHINGTON -- Is it not a thing of wonderment that the two leading families of the Party of the Poor and Down-and-Out are ending the summer in Martha's Vineyard? Both the Obamas and the Clintons are renting spacious mansions, probably from Wall Streeters, on that enchanted isle. They're playing golf and tennis, and -- who knows -- croquet, just like the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. Yet do not expect them to be dining together in the moonlight. In fact, relations between them have turned downright hostile. Hillary this week has made it all but final. She is a neoconservative, a genuine,...

WASHINGTON -- As I reflect on the "inevitable" presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton, I try to put it in historic context. She lacks the shifty eyes, darting hither and yon at her audience and the assembled press corps. Her brow betrays no beads of sweat. Nor is there any noticeable perspiration on her upper lip. She has never exactly said, "I'm not a crook." Though she has certainly slipped up with plenty of other maladroit pronunciamentos, from her famous 1992 boast, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies," to her more recent rant before a Congressional...

WASHINGTON -- The arrival last week of the enormous -- 829 pages! -- and laborious U.S. National Climate Assessment, a report put together by 300 American worrywarts, reminds me of a little noted fact. The American left has no practical solution for many of the problems that agitate it, and that its neurotics hope will agitate us. Put another way, the left is given to setting the American people off on noble quests for which there is no solution. A case in point is global warming or climate change. The global warmists -- mostly drawn from the left -- may...

WASHINGTON -- From time to time, I put down my duties of writing about politics and other human follies and pick up a book, often a book of poetry, often by W. B. Yeats. The other night I read Yeats' poem "The Fiddler of Dooney." It is a little masterpiece, but then Yeats wrote so many masterpieces. It begins: "When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea; My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet, My brother in Mocharabuiee. " And on it dances for a few more stanzas, delighting the eye and the...

WASHINGTON -- National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday and said that when she had appeared on several news outlets back in September 2012 to state that the attack on an American diplomatic installation in Benghazi was a "spontaneous reaction" to an American-made film that appeared on YouTube she had used "the best information we [the White House] had at the time." Senator John McCain responded to her statement Sunday that it left him "almost speechless." The Arizona Republican said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that "I'm almost speechless, because it's patently obvious, first of...

WASHINGTON -- It is happening again. The media tell us there is a huge groundswell of support for Hillary to run for the presidency in 2016. Already an enormous political action committee has been formed. She is again -- as she was in 2008 -- the Inevitable Candidate and, by the way, the Inevitable President. Moreover, the mainstream media are, of course, with her. These are what I have been calling for over 20 years the media's Episodic Apologists. Their professional lives have followed a well-worn arc since at least 1992 when the Clintons first emerged nationally -- though the...

WASHINGTON -- "What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," observes Camille Paglia, the learned iconoclast and professor of humanities at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She made that observation in a lengthy interview with The Wall Street Journal, the highbrow newspaper that proves daily that intelligent journalism in America is neither dead nor near bankruptcy as long as it holds to the right values. Paglia was talking about our civilization, and I have nothing to add save one caveat. I recall the late 1970s, when America was pretty much in a heap. Suddenly, along came the...

WASHINGTON—It is now apparent that our President has lied to us. He lied when he crooned soothingly about improving the healthcare of millions of Americans through vast changes in health policy that would actually lower their costs. Those costs are now going up, and they are going up for almost everyone. They will not come down. He lied when he said we could keep our present healthcare policy. Those policies are rapidly disappearing. He lied again when he said we could keep our doctors. He lied when he said his plan would not involve rationing. I could go on, but...

WASHINGTON — The historic blunders of President Barack Obama’s embarrassing healthcare rollout demonstrate spectacularly the utter failure of what? Let me tell you. They are the blunders of what was once called the “Brightest Generation” in American history, the 1960s generation. It did not start with Obama. His blunders were just a continuance of their blunders. By the 1960s generation I mean the pot-smoking, war-protesting, guitar-strumming kids of the left—not the majority from the 1960s generation, not the silent majority, but the minority. They were the miracle workers in politics: Jean-François Kerry, the Clintons, Al Gore, Joe Biden, and all...

WASHINGTON -- When Senator Rand Paul took to the floor of the United States Senate the morning of March 6 he really -- as they say -- may have made a difference. It is a difference in our awareness of the issues facing the country. It is a difference in our perception of the man who is leading the country, President Barack Obama. It might even have been a difference in the direction the country will go. Will it continue on its melancholy path toward statism or will it follow the course of freedom as laid out by the Founding...

WASHINGTON -- I do not know about you, but to me this sequestration imbroglio is getting interesting. Last week, I wrote of my surprise that a basic untruth was being repeated over and over again by the White House, to wit, that the Republicans were responsible for the monstrosity of sequestration. I wrote that, as I recalled it, sequestration was an idea introduced by the White House to coax the Republicans and the Democrats into a deal in the summer of 2011 to raise the ceiling on the national debt. Remember that deal? And another thing, there would be no...

Guatemala -- Where is that, you ask? Generally this column comes to you from Washington, D.C. or New York City. Occasionally it comes from London or Paris. Today it carries the dateline of a seaport in Guatemala, and if it were written a day ago or two days hence it would carry the dateline of Belize. It is freezing up north. The inclement weather has driven me to tropical parts. Global warming sounds more and more agreeable to me and, frankly, if you have your wits about you, to you, too. The frozen remains of palm trees have supposedly...