What Did You Just Say?

The missus this morning wanted to make a point about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."  She called it "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."  The Wichita Bureau thinks she may be onto something: "It would appear," WB observes, "that short of showing up in the marriage column of the local newspaper, the services are neither asking nor listening."

You know, there is precedent for that sort of thing.  By my recollection, a delegation of Netherlandish Jews presented themselves to Charles II Stuart of Britain and asked permission to resettle in Britain (they had been kicked out hundreds of years before."  Charles said: go ahead and do it, but don't make me say anything.

Seems to me it worked pretty well.  By the early 19th Century when a Rothschild went into Parliament, Jews were a substantial presence in British commercial and financial life--though, as I recall, disbelief in the Trinity was still nominally a hanging offense.