Like Being the Chief Rabbi in Mecca

I heard David Brooks on C-Span 2 last night.  He uncorked a very funny line. "I am the conservative at The New York Times, which is like being the chief rabbi in Mecca."

By the way, it was a mention by Brooks in his latest book that got my friend Lupu onto Soloveitchik.  Now I am reading the good rabbi.  I have finished The Lonely Man of Faith and I've started on Halakhic Man.  Impressive and important for those of us exercised by the Athenian-Hierosolymanic dialectic.

In other humor news, Heather Wilhelm reports, via Chelsea Clinton, that the Clinton family motto is, wait for it:

“We have a saying in my family—it’s always better to get caught trying (rather than not try at all).”

Wilhelm comments:

Full disclosure: When I first read that sentence, I laughed out loud. Next, I read it two more times, just to make sure it was not some glorious figment of my imagination. “Get caught trying?” Who makes this their family motto? Concerned that I was missing the popular resurgence of this wise old adage—a saying that ranks right up there with “There’s more than one way to obliterate an old email server” and “If the silverware is missing, Sandy Berger’s pants are a-jangling”—I decided to Google “get caught trying.” If you’re looking for lots of advice on how to do things like hide an affair from your spouse, illegally sneak over the border, or fight off a wild crow that is trying to eat your lunch, I suggest you do the same. 

Here’s the thing: If you “get caught” doing something, it implies that you are doing something secretive, underhanded, or out-and-out bad. What kind of family, outside of the Corleone crime syndicate, instinctively associates “trying” with doing something surreptitious, or an action where one can get “caught”? Moreover, is there any one-liner in the history of the world—with the exception, of course, of “It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is”—that better sums up the Clinton ethos?

What Miss Wilhelm fails to realize, however, is the signal impetus Bill Cinton gave to a renewed assault upon the question of the meaning of Being, die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein, a question occluded and forgotten (Seinsvergessenheit!) in political precincts until Bubba re-ignited it with his penetrating inquiry into the manifold meanings of 'is.'