Why not bring in "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek to moderate your gubernatorial debate?

That's the right question, but you don't ask the question first in "Jeopardy!"

I'm reading "Alex Trebek moderated a gubernatorial debate in Pennsylvania. It didn’t go well" (WaPo).

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) and his Republican challenger, Scott Wagner, sat on stage, their faces frozen and their hands clasped. And Alex Trebek, the “Jeopardy!” host and the moderator of Monday night’s debate, let loose, joking that the only thing with a lower approval rating that the Pennsylvania legislature was the Catholic Church.

Polite laughter from the audience quickly turned to boos. Trebek, dressed in a purple flowered tie with a matching pocket square, looked out at the crowd watching the two candidates face off at an upscale hotel in Hershey, Pa. “Don’t go there,” the white-haired television host said, wagging a finger. “I was born and raised in the Catholic Church and I’m just as ticked off as everybody else is over what has happened with the church.”

He went on, unfazed by the ticking clock and the fact that the debate was nearly halfway over. “When I was a young teenager I attended a Catholic boarding school run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Two-hundred and fifty students, other boys and I, spent three years sharing the same accommodations 24/7 with 44 priests and not once in those three years was there any sexual misbehavior. Now boys are pretty sharp, we talk, we would have known. So I believe that there are Catholic priests out there who are able to minister to their congregations without preying — that’s P-R-E-Y — on the young people.”

The comments on WNEP-TV’s live feed were merciless. “Where is this going?” said one. “When do we get to hear from the candidates?” added another. A third viewer put it succinctly: “Alex, shut up.”...

Trebek’s celebrity may have attracted some viewers who wouldn’t ordinarily spend their Monday night watching a political forum. But....

What do you mean, "but"?! We made a celebrity President of the United States and that leap of faith worked out pretty well.

Jill Greene, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, told the Reading Eagle that Trebek’s conversational tone was “problematic” and criticized his frequent interjections and asides.

I haven't watched the debate, but I'm leaning toward Trebek now. "Conversational tone was 'problematic'" — ugh. "Frequent interjections and asides." He brought style and spontaneity and a showbiz-based sensibility of moving things along and keeping people interested. I'm guessing.

It reminds me of Trump's defense of his own style, which I've heard enough times to be able to paraphrase: They say I should sound presidential, and believe me, that would be so easy, but you would be so bored.

Okay, here, I found an example:

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"The drinking was unbelievable," said Bernie Ward, who was the sex-ed teacher at Georgetown Prep in the Kavanaugh years...

... and who — according to "'100 Kegs or Bust': Kavanaugh friend, Mark Judge, has spent years writing about high school debauchery" (WaPo) —  "later spent two decades as a radio talk-show host in San Francisco and served six years in federal prison for distributing child pornography."

“It was part of the culture. A parent even bought the keg and threw one of the parties for the kids.”..,

[Mark] Judge wrote that he came to view Ward as an example of his school’s fall from Catholic orthodoxy and traditional discipline into a New Age emphasis on feelings and liberal notions about faith and politics.

Like Kavanaugh, Judge grew up in a Catholic Washington that formed its own social world, centered in the big old houses of Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Potomac.... The big houses were perfect for large Catholic families....

Judge spent two decades in Catholic education, from Our Lady of Mercy to Prep and on to Catholic University. But he came to believe that he had been “cheated out of a Catholic education,” failing to be assigned the great theological works, the rigorous texts he devoured later in life. Rather, he wrote in “God and Man” that at Prep he was “bombarded with drugs, alcohol, widespread homosexuality among the clergy.” The faculty at Prep, he said, had morphed from “tough guys” to “hippies and leftists.”...

“I was a Catholic illiterate kept that way in a Catholic school,” he wrote in “God and Man.”

Judge spent years struggling with his faith. He relished boxing with God, questioning and testing his beliefs. He read his father’s copies of books by G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Merton, works that embraced the mystery of faith, an idea that appealed to Judge’s belief that the most complete people are those who, as Chesterton wrote, have “permitted the twilight . . . with one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.”...

In 2003, a student named Eric Ruyak reported to school authorities that a Jesuit priest who was a teacher at Georgetown Prep had touched him inappropriately. Some Prep alumni, including Judge, rallied around the teacher, the Rev. Garrett Orr, according to several Prep graduates.

“Numerous alumni told me that Judge was going around saying I was emotionally unstable and a sexual deviant,” Ruyak said Thursday. “He told people that the only reason I wasn’t being expelled was my dad was a powerful lawyer and president of Prep’s board.”

An investigation by Jesuit authorities later confirmed Ruyak’s account....

Ruyak's name is familiar from this post, written earlier this morning (which expressed a desire for more articles like the one I'm blogging in here).

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"What [Christine Blasey Ford is] describing, I saw at parties in 2003 and ’04. Boys trying to take advantage of girls who were drunk."

Said Eric Ruyak, who attended Georgetown Prep in the 2000s — long after Kavanaugh left — quoted — for what it's worth — in USA Today.

"It’s predominantly white, very homogeneous," Ruyak said. "There’s a tremendous amount of wealth, no women, and, quite frankly, male teachers making lewd jokes. I feel badly. I know plenty of wonderful guys who went to Prep. "When I went to Northwestern (University), I saw then how malignant that environment really is.”

The article also quotes Elizabeth Mitchell, "a 1995 graduate of Georgetown Visitation, an all-girls Catholic school whose students often interacted with Georgetown Prep's."

"The re was definitely a heavy-drinking, country club-entitled, future-kings idea that I think prevailed," she said. "You had this culture where mom and dad weren't home, and you had these massive mansions."

Why — given that we're so ready to talk about race in connection with this story — are we not talking about religion? These are Catholic schools, and the teachers there attempt to shape the character of the students.

People are talking about Mark Judge's book "Wasted: Tales of a Genx Drunk," but I'm reading his other book "A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll." And there's also "God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling," but at the moment it costs $1,500, so I can't tell you about that, but you can see from the title Judge is highly critical of his own Catholic schooling.

We're too afraid to talk about religion, even though we've plunged deeply into sex and even thrown race in where there's scarcely any reason. Why don't we talk about religion? There are so many Catholics on the Supreme Court that it's bizarre not to talk about it. Only Breyer and Ginsburg are not Catholic. (Gorsuch was raised Catholic and, like Kavanaugh, attended Georgetown Prep, but since marrying, he has attended Episcopal services with his wife and, I'm reading, refrains from saying whether or not he is Catholic.)

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