"The Clinton e-mail scheme has always been about avoiding accountability, about denying the public a window into Hillary Clinton's disastrous decision-making, her deceptive public pronouncements, and the promiscuous interplay between State Department and Clinton Foundation business. The goal was to keep Secretary of State Clinton's communications from the public until after the 2016 election, at which point President Clinton would be well positioned to bury them permanently.

"Now, the goal is in sight. To pull the scheme off, all Clinton needs is for the current (and future?) attorney general to stonewall for another eight months. Don't forget: The Obama Justice Department has been stonewalling on the egregious Fast and Furious investigation -- in which a federal agent was murdered -- for over five years. You don't think Lynch can tap dance for eight months?

"The question is, Will the public, the media, and the Republican-controlled Congress let her do it behind the Clintonian curtain?"

"What this week really demonstrated was not that Obama has a wee problem with 'the optics' of his job, but that he's stuck forever in campaign mode, confusing rhetoric with leading. ISIS just laughs and reloads when the president chides them.

"Beginning to normalize relations with Cuba is a good idea -- but Obama loved the picture of himself giving a speech in Havana so much that he skipped over the part where he'd win concessions from the regime. Giving away the game was his opening bid.

"We have the kind of president who would drive away from a car lot congratulating himself on his sweet deal after paying the sucker'€™s price -- plus extra for the 'protective undercoating.'"

"There are said to be 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Most are and have been peaceful and peaceable, living their lives and, especially in America, taking an admirable role in the life of the nation.

"But this is a tense, fraught moment within the world of Islam, marked by disagreements on what Islam is and what its texts mean. With that context, the child's math: Let's say only 10% of the 1.6 billion harbor feelings of grievance toward 'the West,' or desire to expunge the infidel, or hope to re-establish the caliphate. That 10% is 160 million people. Let's say of that group only 10% would be inclined toward jihad. That's 16 million. Assume that of that group only 10% really means it -- would really become jihadis or give them aid and sustenance. That's 1.6 million. That is a lot of ferociousness in an age of increasingly available weapons, including the chemical, biological and nuclear sort.

"My math tells me it will be a long, hard fight. We will not be able to contain them, we will have to beat them.

"We must absorb that central fact, as Ronald Reagan once did with a different threat. Asked by his new national security adviser to state his exact strategic goals vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, Reagan: 'We win, they lose.'"

"Over the coming days Europe will once again pass through terrorism's stages of grief: despair over innocent lives cut short; anger towards the young men and women (some of them citizens) who kill in the name of jihad; questions about the grip of the police and intelligence services; and eventually, as news bulletins and headlines subside, a weary resignation.

"Yet even now, immediately after the attack, two lessons are clear. One is that, despite being at the top of the most-wanted list for years, ISIS remains resourceful enough to mount synchronized bombings in the heart of Europe. The other, which flows from this, is that big cities in Europe and America will have to get used to a long campaign of terror in which all are targets. ...

"Many will dread the struggle ahead and regret the never-ending contest between security and liberty. But as long as jihadists threaten the West, there is no escaping the need to act. Welcome to the new normal."

"It is neither a surprise nor a mistake that the latest major Islamic terrorist attack to befall Europe targeted Brussels, the heart of European multiculturalism. Decades of willful blindness to the problem of ideological fanaticism left the capital of the European Union neglectful of serious threats to its security, and, on Tuesday, terrorists exploited that: Following the detonation of explosives at Brussels's Zaventem Airport and a major Metro station during the morning rush hour, at least 31 people are dead and another 180 injured. The Islamic State has claimed credit for the attack. ...

"The current administration, Hillary Clinton, and their allies on the left are determined to maintain that the Islamic State and the other off-brand varieties of Islamic terrorism will wither away if we only close Guantanamo or provide better employment opportunities in Raqqa. But this is war, and sooner or later, that will require a serious strategy, carried out by leaders serious about keeping America safe. Ideally, they will opt to formulate and execute that strategy before the Islamic State crops up at JFK and Grand Central Terminal."

"If Cuba were a repressive, small-minded military dictatorship of the right, Obama'€™s visit and accommodationist attitude wouldn't be considered so broad-minded. But a patina of revolutionary romance, embodied by that image of Che looking down on President Obama, still hangs over Cuba. It makes its human-rights abuses, theft and lies an after-thought, or even excusable, for the American left.

"After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Che said that in the event of a US attack, 'if the missiles had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression.' It would have been beyond his imagining that so many decades later, with the revolutionary regime cash-strapped and decrepit, the imperialist Goliath would come bearing gifts, and asking for nothing substantial in return, except a line in Obama'€™s Wikipedia entry."

"FBI chief James Comey and his investigators are increasingly certain presidential nominee Hillary Clinton violated laws in handling classified government information through her private e-mail server, career agents say.

"Some expect him to push for charges, but he faces a formidable obstacle: the political types in the Obama White House who view a Clinton presidency as a third Obama term.

"With that, agents have been spreading the word, largely through associates in the private sector, that their boss is getting stonewalled, despite uncovering compelling evidence Clinton broke the law."

"It should be no surprise that when we bequeath monarchical powers to nine -- or eight -- lawyers, the battle for succession to one of the nine thrones will be ugly. Indeed, it's surprising it's not uglier. We spend billions of dollars trying to pick a president of the United States, and in many respects the Supreme Court is now more powerful than the presidency. It's certainly far, far, far less democratic. We appoint justices for life and many of their decisions cannot be overturned by the Congress, or the people, short of a constitutional convention.

"The left, which pays a lot of lip-service to the 'people power' and democratic action, has given us these black-robed kings and queens. They shouldn't be surprised when the game of thrones gets ugly. It's their game."

"Conservatives should not accept an extreme left-wing judicial activist. They should not accept an extreme right-wing judicial activist, if there were such a thing. They should not accept a moderate judicial activist, for the same reason that they would not shoot themselves in the foot with a firearm of moderate caliber. Litmus tests may be in bad odor with our self-proclaimed sophisticates, but here one is very much in order: The law is the law is the law, and it isn't anything else. Those who believe otherwise do not belong on the Supreme Court any more than moderate phrenologists belong on medical-school faculties or moderate foxes should be assigned guard duty at the henhouse.

"If the best that can be said of Garland is that he would do only moderate violence to the Constitution, then that is a complete and whole case against confirming him, or even considering his confirmation."

"What a difference a week makes.

"Last Tuesday, Bernie Sanders's stunning victory in the Michigan primary upended the Democratic establishment's expectations and placed Hillary Clinton's inevitable ascendancy on hold.

"But the established order reasserted itself on Tuesday night -- this time, probably for good. Clinton laid a goose egg on Sanders, winning five out of five contests across a diverse swath of America and permanently putting to rest her rival's contention that she's a 'regional candidate' who struggles outside the South. Though the Sanders campaign shows no signs of quitting the race anytime soon, the Vermont senator's empty-handed finish seems to augur the beginning of the end for his 'political revolution.'"