English majors will be familiar with the term explication de texte, and with Maureen Dowd’s claim in the New York Times that “one top Democrat” said, “I’m telling you, man, it’s something about our party, the shtetl mentality,” we once again require an explication.

What is a shtetl, besides riddled with consonants? A shtetl is a 19th-century Eastern European Jewish village, but by referring to a shtetl mentality, the “one top Democrat” invoked the concept of a psyche “timid and fearful of repercussions” and prone to excessive analysis.

According to Dowd, this mentality, like essentially every problem in the party during the 2008 presidential race, may be attributed to the Clintons. She enumerates various Clinton offenses, including that Hillary Clinton “added insult to injury by coming out Tuesday night looking great in a blazing orange pantsuit,” an apparently odiously malicious maneuver.

At least Dowd resisted the urge to write another column consisting entirely of failed attempts at satirical  hypothetical dialogue between political characters a la The Last Debate. If she had, we might need to succumb to approaching the newspaper with a shtetl mentality.