The continued expansion of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal — now with 22 emails from her personal server deemed too classified for public view, even in redacted form — is making Watergate seem like a shoplifting episode at a 7-Eleven.

That now-ancient scandal was a pathetic and ugly fiasco — a dimwitted defense of an absurd break-in an election that was already won. Nobody got hurt, even remotely. Some sleazy pols went to jail and Nixon’s reputation — in an otherwise decent presidency — was besmirched forever.

Emailgate is far worse. It’s now clear it involves the potential endangerment of human lives (our lives and those of our friends) across the globe and the national security of the United States and undoubtedly the free world. It is an incomparable scandal.

But, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, a far greater danger looms. If the FBI recommends the prosecution of Clinton and/or several of her minions and they are not indicted, the rule of law will have ended in the United States of America. Can you imagine a more unmitigated disaster for our country?

Why Clinton could have done what she did will be the subject of many books and studies. Lord Acton’s famous lines about the corruption of power will undoubtedly be cited, not to mention the suddenly classified emails of that lightweight wannabe Rasputin Sidney Blumenthal, but this is not what concerns me at the moment. (The sudden recommendation of Barack Obama for the Supreme Court by Mrs. Clinton is also almost risible in its obviousness.)

The preservation of justice is what preoccupies me as I type this article on the plane to Des Moines. This election is even more crucial than we realize — but particularly on the Democratic side. Many plausible Republicans are competing in this election. We all have our preferences, but none, to my knowledge, have done anything even roughly equivalent of Mrs. Clinton. None are under investigation by the FBI.

Her opponent Bernie Sanders has played it cute, at first proclaiming the emails irrelevant and more lately excusing himself from the question. He claims not to want to be seen as interfering in an ongoing investigation.

Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to. We all know the hoary advice not to interfere with your opponent when they’re busy destroying themselves.

But is she? That is what we are going to be finding out in Iowa. That state is supposed to be the heartland of America. Do such people, in this case the liberal and “progressive” Democrats among them, countenance such criminal dishonesty? Let’s hope for all our sakes they don’t.

Now it should be obvious I am no fan of Sanders, nor do I even slightly #FeeltheBern. Anyone who could believe in socialism at this point in human history lives in a galaxy far, far away. And that galaxy is moral narcissism. Not only is socialism in its more severe forms (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc.) a mass-murdering doctrine of astronomical proportions never before seen by humanity (somewhere in the realm of a hundred million in the 20th century), in its supposedly benign form it simply doesn’t work.

Bernie blathers on about how we should be more like Scandinavia, without bothering to mention that the Scandinavian countries have been abandoning socialism willy-nilly for the last decade. On this level he is either ignorant (too much Ben & Jerry’s?) or just another prevaricating pol, spewing a line of nonsense to the gullible. Sadly, the gullible in this instance consist of many young people who have already been indoctrinated with the same shopworn propaganda during their educations. They certainly don’t need more to it.

But that can be sorted out in the general election by Marco, Ted, Donald or whomever the GOP nominates. For now, on the Democratic side, I’m for Bernie. Without the rule of law, there is no America for any of us.

Uploaded from Denver Airport. See you in Iowa.