Reactions to the crashing of a White House state dinner have run the gamut from A (for alarm at the security breach, such as it was) to Z (zingers aimed at arrivistes Tareq and Michaele Salahi).

The idea that someone would assault the president with silverware strikes me as improbable. In fact, that scenario reminded me of the state-dinner scene in "Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear," in which Leslie Nielsen's dimwitted detective commits mayhem against Winnie Mandela. As for the tastelessness of the national home invasion -- well, social climbing is as American as cherry pie.

Another angle: Should the leader of this country be holding invitation-only fancy-dress affairs at all? A friend reacted to outrage over the crashing with this populist post on Facebook: "This is an outrage. The next thing you know, the public will be thinking it's THEIR government."

I don't think Obama should follow Andy Jackson's example and invite the rabble to trudge through his house. On the other hand, this is not a monarchy, and so a little restraint and republican virtue might be in order. Black tie shouldn't be optional at a state dinner in a democracy -- it should be forbidden. Then maybe the crashers would stay away.

Lou Dobbs is not ruling out running for president. But if the past is any guide (remember presidential candidate Joe Biden?), he may be willing to take second place on the ticket. Palin-Dobbs, anyone? The only condition that Lou might impose on the deal would be for Palin to show ID if she came to the GOP convention through Canada.

-- Michael McGough

The New York Times reports that conservatives  have been drawing up a 10-point checklist -- to be printed on litmus paper? -- against which the Republican National Committee should measure prospective GOP candidates.

There's nothing surprising about the contents of the proposed creed (for example, opposition to government funding of abortion and President Obama's "socialist agenda"). Nor is the idea of a conservative loyalty test. It was implicit in the muscling by true believers of a Republican nominee for a House seat in New York who didn't toe the ideological line.

Never mind that Democrats captured that seat after the withdrawal of the scorned RINO (Republican in Name Only). Conservative Republicans increasingly seem willing to sacrifice electoral success on the altar of philosophical purity, and moderate Republicans are increasingly are an endangered species. That's good news for Democrats, but bad news for those of us who believe that a modicum of diversity in both parties is conducive to compromise and good government.

But back to the surprising thing about the proposed Index of Acceptability: the fact that 70% is a passing grade. Answer seven questions right and you get an endorsement and funding. Get six right and you flunk.  ("Bummer! I messed up that abortion question. Maybe I can do something for extra credit.") If too many candidates fall short, the party may have to start grading on the curve.

-- Michael McGough

With the fuss we make over Thanksgiving, I’d bet most Americans believe the Pilgrims were the first nonnative American settlers in North America.

And that narrative didn’t begin at Plymouth Rock.

The first permanent English settlement was in Virginia, not Massachusetts, in Jamestown, not Plymouth – in 1607, not in 1620.

So how did the Pilgrims, and not the folk of Jamestown, manage to get top billing, even though they showed up 13 years late to the party that became the United States of America (and about 35 years after the short-lived Roanoke Colony)?

Maybe it was demographics. The Pilgrims came with women and children (and some nonbelievers); women didn’t come to the Jamestown colony until the year after it was settled.

Maybe it was class structure. The Pilgrims arrived with indentured laborers, as did the Jamestown company. But the Jamestown group seemed more class-stratified, being, at least by Captain John Smith’s account, excessively burdened with ‘’gentlemen’’ averse to labor.

Maybe it was because, at the outset anyway, the Pilgrims evidently got on better with the native Americans than the Virginia colonists did (save for the renowned story of Pocahontas saving the life of Captain John Smith, for what that’s worth).

Maybe it was the motive for coming here in the first place, at least motive through the lens of history. Plymouth and Jamestown both had feet in a couple of joint English stock companies. One of its excursions actually set up housekeeping in Maine in the same year that Jamestown was settled, but it was soon abandoned.

Anyway, that’s my thinking. What’s yours? How did Bay State turkey trump Virginia ham, and the Pilgrims trump the Virginians in history and imagination? 

-- Patt Morrison

America's Roman Catholic bishops aren't completely obsessed by abortion and gay marriage. My former colleague Ann Rodgers, one of the best religion reporters around, reports in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that bishops have been battling over whether to approve a retro English translation of the Mass with more traditional (and, critics charge, more stilted) language.

The new/old language won out at the recent bishops' conference. So now when the priest says "The Lord be with you," the congregation will reply "And with your spirit," not "and also with you," the current, clunky and inaccurate translation of the response I learned as an altar boy: "Et cum spiritu tuo." Like W.H. Auden, I believe that you can combine conservatism in liturgical language with more progressive political view.

Conservatism is cool even when it leads to technical language. Take the line in the Nicene Creed in which, in recent years, Jesus has been described as "one in being with the Father." Now he will be described as  "consubstantial with the Father." Abstruse? Perhaps. But truer to the Latin rendering of a Greek theological distinction that once led to violence between Christians. Confusion can beget a look into church history.

Even archaic non-theological language can be a spur to education. When Christians used to say that Christ would return to judge the "quick and the dead," parents could explain to their bewildered children that "quick" referred not to marathon runners but to those who were living, who had been quickened in their mothers' wombs. The lesson could then turn to the expression "cut to the quick."

Now that the Vatican has invited restive Anglicans to bring at least some parts of their majestic Book of Common Prayer with them when they cross the Tiber, the "regular" Catholic Church has to worry about non-tone-deaf believers switching  to the new church-within-a-church. The new/old liturgy approved by the bishops could be a bulwark against such defections.

-- Michael McGough

I met Tim Russert only once, before a "Meet the Press" debate between two Senate candidates from my home state of Pennsylvania. Russert was engaging, impressively au courant with Keystone State politics and, well, a nice guy. I also admired his work, and I was sad when he died before his time. (You never hear about someone dying at his time.)

Still, I cringed at the excessiveness of his obsequies. Journalism has a long, and appealingly human, tradition of providing a little nicer send-off to colleagues than someone in another business might receive. That's why newspapers give their own printers and truck drivers suspiciously long obituaries. The over-the-top eulogies for Russert were a species of this phenomenon, but that didn't make them less bizarre. I like to think that Russert, looking down, would want to interrupt his media mourners in mid-gush just the way he called politicians on their prevarications.

But at least that's over now -- except that it isn't. Tomorrow the Newseum (I know, it's a goofy name for an interesting resource) will unveil a new exhibit: a re-creation of Russert's office at NBC News, complete with his desk "stacked high with research material, books and handwritten notes, illustrating the rigorous preparation Russert put into each show" and "mementos of his beloved Buffalo Bills." What, no Rolodex?

This has just a whiff of the medieval Catholic practice of venerating relics of the saints, which probably would amuse Russert -- and, I hope, embarrass him.

So Californians may yet again endure the letdown of an electoral battle royal that never was. In 2002, it was supposed to be Riordan-Davis; in 2010, the "what if" may be Fiorina-Boxer. The outcome of a Boxer-DeVore match (the latter, as Weigel reports in his article, has expressed Obama birther sympathies) would seem a foregone conclusion. After all, when asked to choose between a far-from-the-mainstream partisan and an incumbent with limited legislative accomplishments, Californians in the past have sided with the bland over the bracing.

-- Paul Thornton

Left photo: U.S. Sen. Barabara Boxer. Credit: Michael Reynolds / European Pressphoto Agency.
Right photo: GOP Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina. Credit: Michal Czerwonka / Getty Images.

It was a blow to Roman Catholic liberals when the Vatican announced last month that it would welcome, en masse, conservative Anglicans who share the pope's opposition to female clergy and traditional views about homosexuality. But there was a silver lining for liberals: The fact that in welcoming married Anglican priests to the fold, Pope Benedict XVI was perhaps opening the door to married priests within so-called Latin Rite Catholicism. (Eastern Rite Catholics, who recognize the pope's authority but follow rites similar to those of Eastern Orthodoxy, do ordain married men, though Eastern Catholics in the United States were pressured to conform to Western practice so as not to "scandalize" their Irish Catholic neighbors).

But the publication this week of the decree implementing the overture to Anglicans suggests that the slope to married Catholic priests isn't that slippery. After saying that married former Anglican priests could be ordained as Catholic priests, the "Apostolic Constitution" stops short of adopting the Anglican practice of routinely ordaining men who want to become priests.

While authorities of the new church-within-a-church will abide by "the discipline of celibate clergy in the Latin Church, as a rule," an "ordinary" (a bishop or former Anglican bishop) may also ask the pope for permission to ordain married men "on a case-by-case basis." This could be a face-saving way to perpetuate the Anglican tradition of a married clergy without saying so, or it could be a warning that married Anglican laymen will be ordained only rarely. Either way, the new Anglican body within Catholicism will not have the autonomy enjoyed by the Eastern Catholic churches.

The more stinging rebuff to Roman Catholic advocates of married priests is this rather mean-spirited provision of a companion document: "Those who have been previously ordained in the Catholic Church and subsequently have become Anglicans, may not exercise sacred ministry in the Ordinariate." In other words, if you left the Catholic Church and now want to return alongside other Anglican priests, you are treated worse than an Anglican priest who never belonged to the Catholic Church in the first place.

Perhaps the purpose of this provision is to prevent married Roman Catholics who want to be ordained as priests to pretend to convert to Anglicanism so that they can go back through the revolving church door and be accepted as married Catholic priests. But how likely is that? And if the church is willing to incorporate Anglican traditions that don't violate Catholic doctrine (as opposed to a mere regulation like mandatory celibacy), why not treat the new Anglican Rite exactly as the Eastern churches are treated? The only justification for that inconsistency is to stifle discussion about ending mandatory celibacy for Roman Catholic priests.

-- Michael McGough

When I say "our," I mean the collection of Times editorial writers and editors who worked in the same department 20 years ago as I do now (for the record, I was 9 years old when the then-undead German Democratic Republic announced on Nov. 9, 1989, that it  would allow its prisoners -- er, citizens -- to travel freely to capitalist West Berlin and West Germany). Brighter minds than mine have already weighed in on the historical significance of the intervening 20 years between the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe of 1989 and now (click here for a roundup of today's Berlin Wall punditry). Today on our own Op-Ed page, columnist Gregory Rodriguez waxes historical about the Cold War nostalgia for the moral clarity provided by the Berlin Wall, and Mitchell Koss reminds us of the revolutionary actions of Hungarians several months prior to the events in East Germany. On Sunday we published the accounts of six former East Germans on their experiences as citizens of a reunited Germany.

Below is a Times editorial published on Nov. 10, 1989, the day after the East German politburo lifted emigration restrictions on its own citizens and precipitated the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Though The Times relishes the excitement of the moment, the editorial steers clear of any prognostication about the future of communism in Eastern Europe (much less the Soviet Union, which would cease to exist two years later) and devotes much of its ink to analyzing the realpolitik behind East Germany's actions.

-- Paul Thornton

The full editorial:

Public option, shmublic option. If you really want to get people worked up about healthcare reform, start talking about whether it should cover abortions and illegal immigrants. Today, the editorial board tackles both those issues, saying that abortion opponents are looking to "extend federal prohibitions into private pocketbooks. By restricting coverage offered through the exchange, they hope to make abortion coverage so unattractive that insurers eventually stop offering it in the market for individual and small-group policies." Healthcare reform thus should not restrict those who receive subsidies from buying extra coverage for abortions. And it's an odd healthcare policy that would eliminate all possibility for illegal immigrants to participate in subsidized care, but require them to purchase their own coverage regardless of their personal finances, the board argues.

"Extraordinary rendition" is just a dressed-up word for kidnapping in the editorial board's eyes, and it praises Italy for recognizing that fact, if mainly symbolically, by convicting 23 Americans and two Italians in absentia for grabbing an Egyptian cleric in Milan six years ago.

On the other side of the fold, the author of a book on the Cold War argues that former President  Reagan's seemingly bold words to Mikhail S. Gorbachev --"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." -- were for the most part a cover intended to build popular support for the president while he worked on effective diplomatic relations with the then-Soviet president.

And writer Joe Mathews raises his hand for the job of lieutenant governor. It's not that he has ambitions to run anything, he says, and that's exactly what qualifies him for the job. Meanwhile, think of all the spare time he'd have for blogging.

-- Karin Klein

Photo: People stroll by the giant dominoes set up at the site of the Berlin Wall, part of a gala celebration of its toppling. Credit: Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters