WASHINGTON -- Political observers are still speculating about whether the July 4th New York Times report on the loony biography of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was meant as a hit-job or an encomium.

If you dutifully read the weekend newspapers and watched the Sunday morning gasbags on television, I suspect you departed the chaos with a terrible headache. Possibly you departed for the bar.

The Republican Party, the political party of commerce (and of jobs!), has two aspiring candidates for the presidential nomination who are drawn from the business community. One evokes unwarranted snoozes; the other, rather astonishingly, evokes derision.

What did I tell you a couple of weeks ago? In fact, what have I been suggesting for months? Hillary Clinton is going to have a very tough time winning her party's nomination.

For a generation -- perhaps longer -- the liberals have been segregating Americans into smaller and smaller groups. Then they claim to be each group's unique champion.

Are American voters still suckers for identity politics?

Before he passed away recently, John M. Templeton, the distinguished physician and philanthropist, questioned: "Should we tolerate a public educational system with its entrenched self-interest which virtually every inner-city parent knows is destroying any hope or possibility of their children achieving meaningful opportunity in a 21st-century economy?"

WASHINGTON -- Last week, Prince Charles, in all likelihood the next monarch of Great Britain, suffered a defeat.

In this land of capitalist chaos, there is something quaint about Bernard Sanders, the senator from Vermont, running for the Democratic presidential nomination as a Socialist. He is not running as a liberal or a progressive, or even a vegetarian, but as a Socialist!

WASHINGTON -- 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.

WASHINGTON -- Does it strike you as an indication of a political party's robust vitality that in a country of more than 300 million people that party has just one likely nominee for president? Notwithstanding the fact that she has at her disposal nearly a billion dollars, she is 67 years old and stands accused of committing at least one felony. What country are we talking about, the old USSR? No, we are talking about the contemporary U.S. of A.

WASHINGTON -- Notwithstanding what the Marxist whim-wham artists have been telling the youths of our country for over a generation, there has been little sign of a true aristocracy in America. For a very short period of time, something like an aristocracy appeared during the era when the robber barons plied their arts, but it did not last.

WASHINGTON -- Does anyone remember what it was that turned America hostile toward the tropical paradise of Cuba?

WASHINGTON -- Some of my most cherished lines from President Bill Clinton's presidency had nothing to do with women with whom he did or did not have sexual relations. Rather, they were inspired by the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which he signed on the South Lawn of the White House on Nov. 16, 1993. At the time, there was not much controversy about what he then said, but they were admirable lines nonetheless. Today they might be deemed heroic lines.

WASHINGTON -- What is going on in American politics of late? There has not emerged a truly goofball politician since Anthony Weiner, the congressman and later New York mayoral candidate who could not resist sending pictures of his private part so frequently and to so many women that it really was no longer a private part but rather a public spectacle. Go ahead; Google it. In fact, Yahoo it. My guess is there are dozens of pictures of Weiner's public private part all over the Internet.

WASHINGTON -- What do you know, the world's leading reformer of Islam is turning out to be a general. He is not a learned mullah. He is not a suicide bomber. He does not even have a weaponized bicycle. He is Egypt's Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi who, somewhat reminiscent of our own General George Washington, turned in his uniform for civilian garb and was elected president of Egypt with a huge majority.

WASHINGTON -- A couple of months back in our nation's capital Senator Rand Paul spoke at The American Spectator's annual Robert L. Bartley dinner and wowed the crowd. However, at the end of his rousing speech, he assumed a more somber tone as he spoke about the plight of America's poor, particularly the poor who commit petty crime.

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.

WASHINGTON -- Readers of this column are familiar with my argument that a conservative tide is sweeping the country, contrary to the mainstream media.

When former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he did not think that "the president loves America," was he right? Of course he was.