A New Year Brings a Fresh Bout of Stupidity from Douthat

Forget about the fact that I consider Ross Douthat's ideology disgusting and his writing sloppy and incoherent. What I find the most annoying is how easily he distorts reality and fills his silly articles with lies. His most recent piece of conservative inanity begins with an outright lie, which The New York Times apparently finds it acceptable to publish:

The American entertainment industry has never been comfortable with the act of abortion. Film or television characters might consider the procedure, but even on the most libertine programs (a “Mad Men,” a “Sex and the City”), they’re more likely to have a change of heart than actually go through with it.

I don't know what's so "libertine" about the profoundly patriarchal Sex and the City, but its leading characters did have abortions. An entire episode was dedicated to Carrie remembering an abortion she had a while ago and reaching a conclusion that it was absolutely the right decision for her. Samantha and Miranda had several abortions and never felt sorry about it.

Whenever an article starts with such a blatant lie, I find it very difficult to take anything else its author proposes seriously. If he disrespects his readers to this extent, who's to say where his lies and distortions will end? Shouldn't a journalist know how to verify his information? Especially the information that's as easy to unearth as anything that has to do with Sex and the City? (Please don't tell me that Douthat made an honest mistake here. This information can be verified in a matter of two minutes at most, which he chose not to do.)

Douthat, who has turned his NYTimes column into a platform for spouting his anti-women beliefs*, suggests that instead of aborting women should give birth and offer the babies up for adoption. As any vile male chauvinist, he doesn't have a foggiest idea of what pregnancy and childbirth entail. This sad buffon, who obviously has never seen an actual woman in his close vicinity, never stop to consider that there might be some effort, work, pain, suffering, loss of productivity, health risk, danger of dying involved in carrying a pregnancy to term and giving birth.

Douthat is one of the reasons I would never subscribe to The New York Times. I can't respect a newspaper that offers a weekly column to somebody so shallow and dishonest. I understand that an intelligent, well-informed conservative journalist is hard to come by, but surely that's no excuse for torturing readers with the stupid concoctions of an unscrupulous Douthat.

*In case you missed it, you can trace my anti-Douthat campaign here.

A Wakeup Call for Poor, Deluded Douthat

The long-time followers of this blog know how much I enjoy ridiculing the New York Times resident conservative freak Ross Douthat. I wrote about his unintelligent, hateful, anti-women columns here, here, here, and here. Recently, however, it seems that Douthat has finally had to face the glaring contradictions that are plaguing his worldview. We all know that for all the Conservatives' talk of family values, they truly suck at creating stable families. Going to Church, abstinence until marriage, and voting Republican mostly guarantee breakups, divorces, and all kinds of misery in one's personal and sexual lives. The incredible frequency of sex-scandals on the Republican side has been notorious. The progressives, however, do a whole lot better at creating stable, life-long marriages and good, happy families.

Today, even somebody as deluded as Douthat had to recognize these obvious facts. In a rare moment of getting back in touch with reality, Douthat admits:

Socially conservative states have more family instability than, say, the culturally liberal Northeast. If you’re looking for solid marriages, head to Massachusetts, not Alabama.

Accepting that his favorite conservative values lead to family breakup and personal misery is, of course, extremely painful to Douthat. Having finally realized that through their silly insistence on abstinence until marriage 

conservatives guarantee that their children will get pregnant early and often (see Palin, Bristol), leading to teen childbirth, shotgun marriages and high divorce rates,

he immediately becomes terrified and starts looking for somebody or something to blame. The answer is found soon: it's abortion. Or, rather, the Liberals openness to consider abortion as a way out in case of an unwanted pregnancy. Any reasonable person with half an ounce of grey matter would conclude on the basis of this information that any opposition to abortion is stupid. That's not a possibility for Douthat, though. Broken marriages, miserable teenagers, sky-high divorce rates are an acceptable price to pay for not allowing women the right to control their own bodies.

Douthat is a perfect example of conservative hypocricy. "Family values" mean absolutely nothing to him. He - as well as all other followers of this ideology - would sacrifice family values in a blink for the possibility of keeping women subjected and under control. These people's hatred of abortion reveals their own extreme sexual insecurity. They don't have political convictions or social concerns. They simply hate female bodies because these bodies repesent the constant threat of revealing to themselves and to the world their sexual failings and incapacities. Douthat and Co have no ideology. They are simply terrified of women, and that's the only opinion, belief or conviction they can offer to the world.

P.S. Turns out that Hugo Schwyzer has also written a great post about this article by Douthat.

Poor Ross Douthat Still Ain't Getting Any

Would some charitable individual just fuck Ross Douthat of the NY Times already and spare us the boredom of his weekly "I-hate-everybody-who-has-sex-because-I-haven't-been-getting-any-for-the-past-decade" opinion column? As spring is approaching, Douthat is getting into his public fits of hysteria over other people's sex lives more and more often. Not surprising, since he so obviously has none of his own.

Today's column is dedicated to Douthat gushing with admiration (the only thing he's been gushing with for oh, so long) over the tabloids' prurient interest in the sex lives of famous people. Oh, how much the sex-deprived Douthat would love to dedicate his life to going through the dirty underwear of politicians, actors, and athletes. Revealing who slept with whom when and in what position has an important social purpose. Besides giving Douthat an outlet for his unrequited sexuality, that is. According to Douthat,

there’s a case for erring on the side of prurience. Some private acts should be publicly disqualifying, and the media need to be willing to go digging for them.

You can just imagine Douthat foaming at the mouth with his enthusiasm for digging for the information on the sex acts of others.

As usual, the "why-are-the-Democrats-incapable of-bipartisanship" Douthat cannot refrain from showing us his blatant use of double standards. (Of course, he would gladly show us something else, but nobody is willing to look.) Where McCain has a

complicated relationship with a female lobbyist

Bill Clinton engages in "philandering". Douthat's attempts to attract attention to the sex scandals within the Democratic Party (which even by the most modest calculations never come close to the staggering numbers of sex scandals among the sex-starved Republicans) lead him to pronouncements that are nothing short of shameless:

If the supermarket tabloid’s reporters hadn’t gone digging where other journalists declined to even tread, we might never have learned how close the Democratic Party came to nominating a truly disgraceful character for the presidency.

Imagine that, a disgraceful character as a presidential nominee, or possibly even as the President. But wait, that's nothing new. We'd had a really disgraceful character as our president for 8 endless years. And his crimes were kind of a little more serious than having a child out of wedlock. Like lying to the American people in order to start an illegitimate unnecessary war that would bring death to thousands. Or authorizing torture. Or taking away our constitutional freedoms. or destroying the middle class.

But why would a NY Times journalist care about all those things when he can gasp over the real horror of an extramarital affair.

Ross Douthat's Suggestion on Sex Ed

I haven't been commenting on the NY Times' opinion columnist Ross Douthat lately for fear of boring my readers with endless criticisms of this ignorant woman-hater. However, his suggestions for high school sex ed programs are too hilarious to be missed. For Douthat, the best kind of sex ed program - the one that will finally reduce unwanted pregnancies and STDs in teenagers - is

an abstinence-oriented program with a strong community-service requirement, and a comprehensive program that essentially provided life coaching as well as sex ed: participants were offered “academic support (e.g., tutoring); employment; self-expression through the arts; sports; and health care.”

Get it? Teenagers are interested in sex, so we should try to distract them with community service and tutoring. They will, without a doubt, get so fascinated by these super cool activities that they will immediately forget all about sex.

This idea that academic support and community service can control the raging hormones of teenagers must be some kind of a new scientific breakthrough. I wonder if Douthat has brought this discovery to the attention of the scientific community. Who knows, there might be a Nobel Prize for him in the near future.

Of course, an ugly, inarticulate, dogmatic religious fanatic like Douthat must have been incredibly unpopular in high school. While everybody around him was exultantly engaging in sexual exploration, he must have been hanging out in boring religious youth camps, hating everybody who was having a good time. Today, he is still tortured by the idea that somebody somewhere might be having a good sex life. This is why he strains his feeble intellect in a search for ways of preventing teenagers from having sex. It is obvious, however, that the best way never to get laid - whether as a teenager or as a grown-up - is to be like Douthat.

Ross Douthat's Hatred of Muslims

The readers who have been following my blog for a while might have noticed that I haven't commented on Ross Douthat's column for several weeks. It seems that the New York Times keeps trying to adopt the practice of making people subscribe to the online version of their paper. For me, the content of this newspaper just isn't worth the trouble, so I simply stop reading it whenever another such attempt is made.

Today, however, I simply have to comment at the new outburst of hatred coming from the most ridiculous parody of a journalist the New York Times has produced. Ross Douthat is a famous hate-monger. We all remember how he shakes with rage at the thought of women's independence. His current object of hatred, though, isn't women. Now, it's Islam.

Talking about the recent note issued by the Vatican that invites the members of the Anglican Church to rethink their religious affiliation and consider switching to Roman Catholicism, Douthat chooses to analyze this event as an attempt to take a stand against Islam on the part of the current Pope: "This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe." This foe, according to Douthat, is what he calls "the Islamic challenge".

It's very annoying when stupid, uneducated people write articles for an esteemed newspaper. Before you can have opinions and express them publicly, you need to educate yourself about the subject you want to opine about. If Douthat actally opened the Holy Quran before trying to express himslef on the subject of antagonism between Christianity and Islam, he would have discovered that Surah 3:3-4 offers the following perspective on Moses and Jesus: "ALLAH is HE besides Whom there is none worthy of worship, the Living, the Self-Subsisting and All-Sustaining. HE has sent down to thee the Book containing the truth and fulfilling that which precedes it; and HE has sent down the Torah (Law of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guidance to the people; and HE has sent down the Discrimination (judgement between right and wrong)." Is that an "enduring foe" speaking, or rather, a friend and an ally? What is the purpose of spewing hatred against a religion you don't know or understand?

Here are some of my previous posts about this joke of a journalist:

http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/09/douthat-and-bush-insanity-continues.html
http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/08/ross-douthats-weekly-exercise-in.html
http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-ross-douthat-considers-sexy.html
http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/06/ross-douthats-hatred-of-women.html
http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/05/ross-douthats-fit-of-virulent.html

Douthat and Bush: The Insanity Continues

You've got to give some credit to Ross Douthat: he must be about the only person in this country right now who he still finds it in himself to defend George W. Bush. Recently, we have seen most Republicans go out of the way trying to prove that their party is not represented by Bush Jr. The damage his presidency has done to the Republican Party (let alone the country at large) might never be overcome. Still, Douthat sticks to his guns and comes out with a garbled piece in defense of the former President.

Any other politician, Douthat claims, would be "canonised" for some of the things Bush did. So what are those things that, according to this journalist, merit canonisation? The answer Douthat provides is unexpected: the war in Iraq (yes, the one that resulted in countless Iraqi and American deaths and turned Iraq into a perennial terrorist threat to the US. Like we didn't have enough of those) and last Fall's economic bailout (yes, the one that had billions of taxpayer dollars going in an identified direction and that many people believe has been Bush's last effort as a president to do a favor to his Wall Street buddies.) Why should Bush be canonised for these actions? According to Douthat, he was trying to correct his own mistakes and that alone deserves respect. Of course, Bush himself never recognized that he actually made mistakes, but a little thing like that doesn't stop Douthat, his most dedicated groupie.

The above-mentioned canonisation-worthy feats are not the only important achievements of the Bush administration. Douthat talks in glowing terms about "Bush-era bipartisanship", which as we all know is the Republican term for "everything always has to be our way." He goes as far as to endorse the disgusting No Child Left Behind Act that makes every K-12 teacher in America go into fits of rage.

In general, it feels like Douthat fell asleep during the last years of Bush's presidency and dreamed up this vision of Bush coming to his senses and correcting his mistakes (which those who have been awake know to be egregiously false). According to Douthat, in the last years of his administration Bush managed to become . . . a good president: "The next time an Oval Office occupant sees his popularity dissolve and his ambitions turn to dust, he can take comfort from Bush’s example. It suggests that it’s possible to become a good president even — or especially — when you can no longer hope to be a great one." Of course, people's definition of 'good' might vary a lot but if this is Douthat's definition of a good presidency, I have to say that his standards are pretty low.

Hating and Fearing Doctors

I wonder why so many people are driven to extremely unreasonable actions that often put their own lives at risk by their inexplicable dread of doctors. This is a sentiment that hugely inspires the whole home-birth movement. Home-birthing websites indulge in endless fantasies about doctors going to incredible lengths to harm the woman and her child during the process of childbirth. Why any doctor would want to harm a patient is never explained.

The same sentiment informs Ross Douthat's latest article on voluntary euthanasia. The journalist creates images of plug-pulling doctors who are happy to end lives of sick patients. Why doctors would want to kill off people indiscriminately remains a mystery. Everybody knows that a doctor whose patients keep dying all over the place will not be very successful in her chosen field. As in any profession, there might be all kinds of maniacs among doctors, but for the most part, doctors want to save lives and not end them.

Douthat's dislike of the concept of euthanasia is not limited to his distrust of doctors. His main enemies - here as well as in every other aspect of human life - are freedom and choice. In euthanasia, Douthat says, "the goal is perfect autonomy, perfect control, and absolute freedom of choice." And for him, these are very bad things. God forbid people should have any rights over deciding what happens to their own bodies.

It's curious how the hatred of the medical profession brings together such unlikely groups as rabid conservatives and feminists. The feminist belief in the woman's right to her own body sometimes degenerates into the unhealthy idea that it's ok to deprive women of quality healthcare during childbirth. I'm sure Douthat's hatred of women would lead him to support home-birthers.

Ross Douthat's Weekly Exercise in Inanity

It's Monday, people, and my favorite joke of a journalist has regaled us with his weekly effort at writing. As an educator, I feel a painful itch to find him and tell him all about the way an argument should be structured and the most common rhetorical errors people commit when writing an analytical piece. Today's article, "A Different Kind of Liberal", should have been titled "Why can't liberals be as close-minded, uneducated, hateful, fanatical, and conservative as ... well, conservatives?"

In this piece, Douthat laments the near disappearance of "America’s dwindling population of outspoken pro-life liberals." What he fails to see, however, is an inherent contradiction between the words "pro-life" and "liberal." The truth is that the mere fact of using the word "pro-life" marks you as decidedly anti-liberal. We have a whole group of society dedicated to a very outspoken defense of this point of view. Those people are called Republicans in the best of cases, and religious fundamentalists in the worst. The idea that liberals would suddenly convert to this ideology is bizarre. What next? The support for "free markets", no gun control. no medicare, no social programs? Can we do all that and still consider ourselves liberals? Apparently, Douthat thinks we can.

One of the things I hate the most about conservatives of Douthat's ilk is their judgmental hypocrisy. He laments the fact that "the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent." In my opinion, you have to have some nerve to judge people who honestly see themselves incapable of raising a Down's syndrome child and choose to terminate. A truly religious person, in my opinion, can have no problem with abortion. For a believer, a mere human being cannot possibly hope to thwart God's plans. I believe that this child will be born eventually, only without the syndrome. Or, as a possibility, it will be born to parents who feel they have the strength to raise such a kid. Douthat's anti-abortion stance, however, has nothing to do with actual religious feeling. As we have seen many times, he is terrified of female independence and feels a profound need to control women.

Another annoying characteristic of this kind of writing is the constant effort at coopting feminism as a way of promoting an anti-feminist agenda. Douthat believes that he somehow has the right of telling women what "real" feminism is all about (in this case, being anti-abortion): "[Eunice Kennedy Shriver] knew what patriarchy meant: she was born into a household out of “Mad Men,” where the father paraded his mistress around his family, the sons were groomed for high office, and the daughters were expected to marry well, rear children and suffer silently. And she transcended that stifling milieu, doing more than most men to change the world, and earning the right to disagree with her fellow liberals about what true feminism required." The daring of a profoundly anti-feminist Douthat in judging what "true feminism" is would bewilder anybody even marginally acquainted with his women-hating writing.

What's so shocking about Douthat is that having failed to understand what being a Conservative means, he would set out to teach liberals and feminists what they should believe or do. He never even mastered the tenets of his own political persuasion and has the cheek to pontificate to others. People like Douthat are an insult to Conservative thought.

What Ross Douthat Considers Sexy

I have to confess that after reading his most recent column in the New York Times, I started feeling kind of sorry for the poor guy. It turns out that two of Douthat's most favorite movies are the pre-pubescent silly comedies Knocked Up and The 40-Year Old Virgin. The reasons why he likes these truly idiotic films is are ideological (trust it to Douthat to find ideology even in something this inane): "They’ve made an effectively conservative message about relationships and reproduction seem relatable, funny, down-to-earth and even sexy." So staying a virgin until the age of 40 and an unwanted pregnancy are what Douthat finds sexy. As we have seen from his previous columns, Douthat's sex life is so miserable that he must be really lamenting not keeping his virginity for good (I wrote about the reasons for his hatred of women here and here .)

The director of these silly movies has just released a new film called Funny People. The lack of success of this movie makes Douthat really sad. I, however, see a lot of hope in this movie's failure. Maybe people are getting tired of this mindless kind of entertainment. Maybe they feel that they can finally have an agency in this world and don't need to numb themselves by Adam Sandler's stupid jokes and repetitive comic routines.

It's funny how Douthat's language always betrays certain truths that Douthat's badly digested conservatism prevents him from verbalizing. This is what he has to say about marriage: "More than most Westerners, Americans believe — deeply, madly, truly — in the sanctity of marriage." Douthat is right here, of course. Believing in the "sanctity" of any institution is, indeed, crazy. Believing in Judd Apatow's movies (which according to Douthat are based on "endless penis jokes and all") is even more insane. These films don't have a message, political or otherwise. All they do is provide us with completely mindless, escapist entertainment that we all need every once in a while. It doesn't oocur to anybody except Douthat, though, to take them seriously and build a political agenda around them.

The Myth of the Liberal New York Times

As if Ross Douthat's weekly column weren't enough, he now spread out to the regular conversation column with Gail Collins. She normally shares this column with David Brooks in a very weird format where she plays the role of a little lady in need of being enlightened by a big smart man. Now that Brooks is on vacation, Douthat substitutes for him.

Douthat's and Collins's debut column is titled "Are Liberals More Corrupt?" The title alone begs the question of why anybody would claim that this is a liberal-leaning newspaper. They could have asked, of course, "Are Conservatives More Corrupt?" or at least "Which Party Is More Corrupt?" But no, our liberal paper par excellence has no interest in exploring even the possibility of the Republican corruption.

In his response to Collins's vapid questioning, Douthat plunges into theorizing about a vague possibility of liberal corruption. There are no actual facts this "journalist" can offer. All he gives us is this truly bizarre conservative reasoning about how the very existence of government fosters lobbying. Lobbying is bad, hence we have to reduce government to reduce the effects of lobbying. He never stops to consider, of course, that a reduced governmental control will allow companies to do whatever the hell they please without even wasting time and energy proving their case to anybody. Besides, taking out the government in order to reduce corruption is like cutting off your head in order to avoid having to buy hats.

Another scary thing is that in an article about governmental corruption there is not a word about the incredible extent of corruption we have seen under the Bush administrations. Has Douthat heard the words "defense industry"? Did he snooze through the Hurricane Katrina debacle? Is he really so out of touch or is he following the well-known sales technique of "fake it till you make it"?

Race in America

I only managed to watch a small portion of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings on television. The part I saw was the speech by one of the New Haven firefighters who feels unjustly persecuted on racial grounds by Judge Sotomayor. I have to confess that it was pretty surreal to see a young white male more or less accuse a Latin woman of racism. The firefighter (whose name I unfortunately failed to catch) was on the verge of tears when he talked about being racially discriminated in America.

Today, I saw a replay of the same attitude by yet another white male. This time, it was a New York Times journalist Ross Douthat who decided that somehow his perspective on racism is valuable enough to be shared with thousands of readers. In his article "Race in 2028," Douthat takes on the issue of affirmative action. Of course, no white person who is against the affirmative action will ever honestly tell you what really bothers them about the concept. The arguments against affirmative action always follow the same scenario. "Of course, I hate racism," says the white person (who now, at least in some cases, thankfully omits to say that some of his closest friends are... you know). "But we have to keep in mind," the white person in question immediately adds, "that there are inherent dangers that always accompany this practice."

The ingeniousness of these imaginary "dangers" ranges from simply bizarre to outright freaky. Douthat's justification for his dislike of affirmative action, Sonia Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama (don't the conservatives just love the president's middle name) is corruption. "A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority," he says and later continues: "But if affirmative action persists far into the American future, that experiment will have failed — and we will all have been corrupted by it." Of course, there is no explanation of how he manages to connect affirmative action and corruption except a hint towards "the backroom dealing revealed by Ricci v. DeStefano, where the original decision to deny promotions to white firefighters was heavily influenced by a local African-American “kingmaker” with a direct line to New Haven’s mayor." For anybody who has lived in New Haven (as I did for several years) the idea of some kind of African-American mafia that influences the mayor and corrupts court proceedings in that city sounds outlandish.

Racism in New Haven is palpable. It's something you live and breathe every single day. That's why it was so shocking to see the white firefighter who somehow managed to dissociate his speech at the confirmation hearings from the everyday reality he experiences in his town. I look at people like the firefighter and Douthat and I wonder how it is even possible for them to avoid the simple realization that absolutely everything they have, do, and experience is the result of centuries of racial discrimination in America.

Affirmative action must come "with a statute of limitations" claims Douthat. It needs to be "phased out" very soon or the white folks will start to get upset and it will turn into "a source of permanent grievance among America’s shrinking white population." It's curious to observe that Douthat honestly believes that it's the white population who has a cause for "permanent grievance." Note the weird, convoluted logic here. Centuries of slavery and segregation only deserve a couple of years of redress. The existence of affirmative action for several decades, however, will justifiably provoke a permanent sense of grievance on the part of folks like Douthat.

Another thing that bothers me in the discussion about affirmative action is this idea that affirmative action is something that racial minorites need and we, the kindly white people, give to them out of sheer niceness. Albeit in different ways, racism hurts every one. It's not the problem of African-Americans or Hispanics. It's the problem of the entire society. It's not a question of what "we" do for "them". It's a question of what all of us should do for ourselves, our society.

I'm very much in favor of affirmative action for my university. I want African-American, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American students in my class. But not because I'm so nice and kind and want to do something good for them. As a teacher, I need these students desperately. I need their contribution, their perspective, their knowledge, their presence, and their talent. I hate Douthat and Co's attempts to coopt my voice as a representative of the "shrinking and permanently aggrieved white population." Racism is what permanently aggrieves me, not affirmative action.

Ross Douthat's Vision of Radicalism

Ross Douthat is a gift that just keeps on giving, people. I had to get up unconscionably early today (8 a.m. for me feels like it's still yesterday) to wait for the refrigerator repair person. Understandably, this put me in a mood so lousy that even massive amounts of coffee didn't help. Thankfully, Monday is a day when the journalist I love to hate published his weekly column. I laughed so hard while reading his article "The Audacity of the Pope" that I'm afraid I woke up the entire building. Making me laugh before 9 a.m. is a feat nobody has been able to accomplish before, so Douthat has a great future in standup comedy once the New York Times finally goes down.

American politics has become very disappointing, says Douthat. The Republicans are despised and "Barack Obama’s agenda looks like the same old Democratic laundry list, rewritten in a sleeker, Internet-era font." Douthat's answer to the problem? Radical thinking: "The governing party is mistrusted, the minority party despised. Yet there’s remarkably little radical thinking taking place." Good, huh? I'm the first person to agree that we need new, fresh, often even radical approaches to the problems we face. Of course, the question arises immediately of where we should look for the radical thinkers and politicians who would be able to offer strikingly new solutions. While the answer to the question has been eluding me for a while, Douthat has the response: the Pope, of course. Here is the radical new thinker whose political agenda will allow the Americans to embrace a new, progressive, non-partisan way of thinking.

Catholic or not, says Douthat, we should all read and feel inspired by Pope Benedicts third encyclical: " Catholics are obliged to take seriously the underlying provocation of the papal message. . . So should all people of good will. For liberals and conservatives alike, “Caritas in Veritate” is an invitation to think anew about their alliances and litmus tests." After this statement, Douthat proceeds to show us how he accomplishes this in practice. He poses a series of questions on important political issues one might expect from a third-grader. Since Douthat has apparently been unable to find answers to these questions on his own, I will provide him with answers.

1) Why should being pro-environment preclude being pro-life?

It doesn't. I'm very pro-environment and at the same time I firmly believe in the right of every woman to be in charge of her own life. I'm pro-life since, surely, being pro-life has to mean being against the death penalty, against war-mongering, and in favor of every individual having access to basic things (clean water, food, medical care) that will make life possible.

2) Why can’t Republicans worry about economic inequality?

Because they are Republicans, dummy. It's like asking why turtles can't fly. The answer is because it's not in their nature. Besides, the whole tone of the question aside from being childish is plain weird. What does Douthat mean by "worry about"? Do the Republicans worry that there is too little economic inequality? Does "worrying" about it include doing anything to change it? Even if they did worry about it, how would that help anybody? Worrying is hardly a very practical occupation for politicians.

3) Why can't Democrats consider devolving more power to localities and states?

Once again, this is hardly a serious question. More power than what? Which "localities" currently suffer from having too little power? What does this whole question mean?

4) Does opposing the Iraq war mean that you have to endorse an anything-goes approach to bioethics?

This is an example of a question the purpose of which is not to seek information. Rather, the point is to make baseless accusations. What's "an anything-goes approach to bioethics"? Why does Douthat accuse people who are against the Iraq war (as opposed to the Afghanistan war or any other war, I guess) of it? If I favor cloning, I have very specific reasons for it. Douthat, who endorses an anything-goes approach to journalism, would never be able to understand that, of course.

5) Does supporting free trade require supporting the death penalty?

Yes, it does, pumpkin. What you are coy enough to call "free trade" destroys so many people that a little death penalty here and there is nothing.

To conclude his article, Douthat laments the absence of such disscussions in Washington: "These questions, and many others like them, are the kind that a healthy political system would allow voters and politicians to explore. But for now, at least, you’re more likely to find them being raised in Benedict XVI’s Vatican than in Barack Obama’s Washington." What Douthat doesn't seem to realize is that a healthy educational system allows people to find answers to these question by the age of ten. Obama's Washington has more serious things to do.

Douthat laments the fact that the Pope's concerns and proposals aren't echoed in Washington: “Caritas in Veritate” promotes a vision of economic solidarity rooted in moral conservatism. It links the dignity of labor to the sanctity of marriage. It praises the redistribution of wealth while emphasizing the importance of decentralized governance. It connects the despoiling of the environment to the mass destruction of human embryos. This is not a message you’re likely to hear in Barack Obama’s next State of the Union, or in the Republican Party’s response." Of course, you aren't likely to hear this arrant nonsense in a President's State of the Union address. This sounds like ramblings of a maniac, or as an attempt of a religious leader to craft an ideology that would cover the obsolete nature of the teachings he has to follow (which is what it is). It will be a sad moment in American politics when we see elected a president dishing out this kind of insanity.

Douthat Comes up with Something Half Decent

I'm very glad that I didn't give up on Ross Douthat after his series of silly and chauvinistic articles. Because today he finally came up with a piece that isn't half bad (If it came from anybody else, I would say the article is pretty much intellectually impotent. Coming from Douthat, however, it's almost a revelation). In his NYTimes article "The Way We Love Now," Douthat talks about how romantic and sexual experiences vary across class lines.

Clyde Griffiths, the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's amazing novel An American Tragedy, realizes that what distinguishes him from the class of rich and powerful men he desperately wants to join is their seeming indifference to sex. In order to succeed in America, you have to tame your sex drive to the point where it will only exist within the strict patriarchal norms of a Puritanical society. Clyde doesn't manage to do that and sees his dreams of social ascension crumble.

Almost 90 years later, Ross Douthat arrives at the same idea: "The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there’s often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate “safe sex” segues into the upwardly-mobile security of “companionate marriages” — or, if you’re feeling more cynical, “consumption partnerships.” This tameness has beneficial social consequences." Of course, if Douthat had read Dreiser in college, he wouldn't have to struggle so much to come up with this analysis. At this point, however, I'll take whatever I can get.

Of course, Douthat's solution is, as usual, shocking in its blatant contempt towards the lowly proles. The poor should give up on sexual excesses, which in turn should be reserved for the Douthats of the world: "Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements."In spite of the parenthetical disclaimer, Douthat's entire piece is obviously motivated with envy towards those who are either too high up or too low down on the social scale to care about the repercussions of their "romantic excess." It's great to see, however, that - whatever the cause - Douthat finally manages to arrive at a thought that can be turned into something productive.

Ross Douthat's Hatred of Women

On the pages of the New York Times, a newspaper that some people mysteriously claim is liberal, Ross Douthat continues to regale us with the sputum he produced as a result of his latest anti-women fit of hysteria. This time, Douthat uses the murder of Dr.Tiller, an incredibly tragic event for any decent human being, in order to bring to light his contempt of women. Of course, he tries to hide his chauvinism behind a tide of empty verbiage but this kind of hatred is too noticeable to be concealed.

Unlike reasonable, enlightened, healthy men with satisfying personal lives (such as President Obama obviously is), Douthat can't concede that women are capable of deciding what happens within their bodies for themselves. He feels that, in spite of not being likely to get pregnant any time soon, he needs to have an opinion on pregnancies. He speaks at length of the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy pregnancy in an attempt to convince his readers that he, Douthat, and not the actual pregnant women and their doctors are better qualified to make that distinction.

He also joins the group of those who try to justify Dr. Tiller's assassination by suggesting that Dr. Tiller performed abortions "on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses." Yet again, I highly doubt thaat Douthat saw these women or these fetuses. He does, however, consider himself qualified to diagnose a group of people he has never seen. And all this just in order to suggest that Dr. Tiller has actually deserved being murdered.

The goal of this piece is to suggest that abortion be "returned to the democratic process." What that means for a virulent chauvinist like Douthat is that we should stop the discussion of third-trimester medical exemptions and move on to the attempt to prohibit second-trimester abortions. Can anybody guess what the next step would be?

Of course, a possibility of stopping any discussion of third, second or first term abortions in order to leave this decision to women and their doctors is too painful for Douthat to contemplate. Women, deciding what to do with their bodies??? Never! Mr. Douthat can make that decision so much better.

Why is Douthat incapable of accepting that women can make reasonable, intelligent, well-informed decisions about their own bodies? I can't help suspecting that the reason lies in this individual's personal history with women. If he accepts this, he will also have to accept that all the women who denied access to their bodies to him (many, many women, judging from his level of hatred) did this because they are unreasonable, stupid, and don't know what's best for them.

P.S. Here is a link to an article by the talented Jodi Jacobson exposing Douthat's lies and distorions.