Kleptocracy in America.     Permit me, please, to quote from my 2009 worldwide bestseller We Are Doomed, Chapter 12, quote:

When Harry Truman left office in 1953, he had no income but his army pension of $112.56 a month. He had to take out a bank loan while negotiating a deal to write his memoirs. That was the way of things all over the Anglosphere. It was part of the tradition of modest Anglo-Saxon government. When Bob Menzies, Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister, left office in 1966 after 18 years in power, having given up a lucrative legal career for politics, he could not afford to buy a house in Melbourne.

End quote. How long ago that seems! Politics today is a money racket. We don't have a democracy; we have a kleptocracy — government by thieves. That's one of the facts behind Peggy Noonan's observation on the detachment of our elites. It is also, am sure, one of the reasons so many people support Donald Trump. Whatever else you might say about Trump, he surely isn't in it for the money.

Just as surely, the Clintons are. We got more confirmation of that on Tuesday this week, when the good-government group Judicial Watch released 300 pages of State Department documents, including numerous hitherto unseen emails, that they had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The emails make it plain that the way to get the attention of Mrs Clinton's State Department was to make a big fat donation to the Clinton Foundation, a pseudo-charity set up by Bill and Hill for them to use as a personal ATM. The Washington Times reported last year that only ten percent of its expenditures go to charitable grants.

The players in the Clinton's pay-to-play scheme are shady characters like Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese construction billionaire who spent years as a close associate of Nigerian military dictator Sani Abacha in the mid-1990s. President Abacha was worth around three billion dollars when he died under mysterious circumstances in 1998.

Having thus mastered the art of milking corrupt Third World politicians, Gilbert Chagoury was naturally attracted to the Clinton State Department. After a seven-figure donation to the Clinton Foundation and a pledge of a billion to the Clinton Global Initiative (another of their slush funds), Mr Chagoury was well-placed. The emails released this week in the Judicial Watch batch make it plain that when Chagoury said "jump" our State Department responded with "how high?"

None of this is really new, of course. We've known for twenty years what the Clintons are up to. Nothing ever gets done about it and nothing will. They've got the whole system covered. Everyone's scared of them, everyone's paid off. It's like Zimbabwe.

The tragedy here — it's a real tragedy, one to make you weep — is the loss of that old ideal of honest, modest Anglo-Saxon government, and its replacement with this shabby Third World crony capitalism.

It takes an effort of imagination now to remember that in the U.S.A. in 1953, in Australia in 1966, you could utter the phrase "public service" with no ironical intent.

That is no longer the case. I have actually watched, on TV, Hillary Clinton say that phrase "public service." It came out of her mouth dripping green slime and stinking like last week's roadkill.