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Synagogue models in the collection of the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., photo by Jared Soares/New York Times (very cool article by Noah Welland about what's really happening in American Judaism). 

Speaking of Monsignor Ross, his Sunday column ("The Jewish Crossroads") was somehow about criticizing Judaism, or Jews, which seemed like a remarkable development even though it was hedged round with the Douthatian hedge—he wasn't actually doing it, just talking about how it might be done—and something that ought to be worth my complaining about, but I couldn't understand what he was up to. Now I think I've got an idea.

Plus an opportunity to tell one of my favorite jokes, about the Jewish Robinson Crusoe. The guy is marooned on a tropical island for 30 years before he's finally rescued, and when the sailors show up he naturally shows them around the environment he's built himself, almost a little town, with a deli where he likes to have breakfast, a grocery store, a bar that serves home-brewed coconut vodka, a park, a public library, and two synagogues.

You can't always get what you want, but if you try some time you just might find you get what you pay for

Drawing by Mark Taylor, 1 February 2018, via The Commoner Call.

I was complaining the other day about newspaper pandits being unable to speak clearly or think clearly abut the current emergency because, since they can't permit themselves to imagine whether Trump is guilty or innocent, they can't imagine what the crime he might be guilty of could have been—clothed in the opacity of the virtually meaningless "collusion" (I can't locate it any more, but I ran into a rightwing debate among people who suspected that "collusion" and "meddling" mean about the same thing, only one sounds more illegal than the other, and couldn't even begin to understand that the journalists are applying one of them to Trump and the other one to Putin and the two men aren't suspected of doing the same thing).

So who should come along to illustrate this but our friend Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, apparently sensing the approach of an epistemological change of some sort over the past ten days or so and readying himself for the possibility that Trump could turn out to be guilty after all, trying to seize that thing, but shrinking from the question of what the thing is ("Trump and Russia: One Mystery, Three Theories—An agnostic's guide to our president's strange conduct"). Instead, falling into the default position of political journalists everywhere, he tries to handicap it: what are the chances that Trump is guilty of whatever it might be? And comes up with a model, with