The New York Times' Ross Douthat (11/15/10) warns us about the nightmare world that "Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots" live in:

It's a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs.

Shudder!  Luckily, Pelosi and co.'s world seems to have diverged from ours around 2003, when the normal retirement age budged up two months, further budging by the same amount until 2008, when it reached 66 years. It's currently scheduled to begin budging again in 2021, until it budges up to 67 in 2026.

In sharp contrast to Pelosi's horrifying dystopia, where such budges are considered unthinkable, in our universe they are so routine that even some people who write about politics for a living seem completely unaware of them.

Ross Douthat has a New York Times column today (5/3/10) criticizing those who are "impugning the motives" of the new Arizona immigration law, which

has been denounced as a "Nazi" or "near-fascist" law, a "police state" intervention, an imitation of "apartheid," a "Juan Crow" regime that only a bigot could possibly support.

Really, says Douthat, the Arizona law is an understandable if unfortunate response to the federal government's failure to "regain...control of its southern border. There is a widespread pretense that this has been tried and found to be impossible, when really it's been found difficult and left untried."

Douthat is quite vague about what he means by "control." If he has in mind policies that would freeze or slightly reduce the number of unauthorized immigrants in the country, we already have those. But Douthat is trying to present a vision of federal action on immigration that would potentially satisfy the people who pushed for Arizona's law, so clearly he has in mind something more ambitious.

Douthat sketches out what such "control" would mean, including "enforcement measures that will inevitably be criticized as draconian: some kind of tamper-proof Social Security card, most likely, and then more physical walls along our southern border." Actually, removing a substantial portion of an estimated 11 million people from the United States would require more than cards and walls; more likely, it would involve massive internment camps and forced transport reminiscent of Balkan ethnic cleansing, if not even grimmer historical precedents. Though it's clearly Douthat's intention to propose a kinder, gentler anti-immigration position for the Republican Party, there's no way to do such a thing in a way that could not be described as "draconian" in all fairness.

But it's Douthat's description of the economic measures necessary to secure that border that is most illuminating: "Curbing the demand for illegal workers requires stiff workplace enforcement, stringent penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and shared sacrifice from Americans accustomed to benefiting from cheap labor." The key phrase here is "shared sacrifice"; Douthat acknowledges, as few people on his side do, that the net effect of forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.

"You can see why our leaders would rather duck the problem," Douthat writes. Yes, you can see why politicians don't want to destroy the lives of millions of people in order to worsen the economic condition of hundreds of millions. What's harder to explain is why some folks would want to do such a thing--explanations that don't involve bigotry, that is.

While FAIR Blog complained earlier (3/30/10) that coverage of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal was overlooking Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's involvement in the story before he became Pope Benedict XVI, yesterday two prominent op-eds focused on this history. Unfortunately, both op-eds present a highly selective version of Ratzinger's role.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (4/12/10) cites the reporting of Jason Berry (National Catholic Reporter, 4/6/10), who is critical of Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, for his support of Marcial Maciel Degollado, a child molester who founded the influential Legion of Christ:

Only one churchman comes out of Berry's story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger. Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money 'for his charitable use.' The cardinal 'was tough as nails in a very cordial way,' a witness said, and turned the money down.... It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.

The Maciel case was similarly cited in a USA Today op-ed (4/12/10) by Philip Lawler, editor of the Catholic World News (and former Senate candidate of the far-right Constitution Party), as evidence of Ratzinger's integrity: "Soon after his election, he instigated action against another notorious abuser: the head of a wealthy and influential religious order."

You wouldn't think from reading these testimonials that Ratzinger was first informed about Maciel's pattern of abuse in 1994, at which time the cardinal reportedly said that the Maciel case was a "touchy problem" due to the "benefits" the priest had brought to the Vatican. (The future pope was later quoted, "One can't put on trial such a close friend of the pope as Marcial Maciel.") Nor would you imagine that Ratzinger's secretary had written in 1999 to the men who had brought detailed charges against Maciel to say that the case against the cleric was considered closed (London Observer, 4/24/05). These details put Benedict's discipline of the then-86-year-old Maciel in 2006 in a less-heroic light.

Both writers also present Ratzinger's centralization of sexual abuse investigations under his office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as evidence for his zeal to persecute child abusers in the church. "It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office," Douthat wrote, while Lawler noted, "In 2001, at Cardinal Ratzinger's urging, all disciplinary cases involving sexual abuse by Catholic priests were assigned to the Vatican office he then headed."

Unmentioned was the controversy over the letter Ratzinger wrote in 2001 threatening to excommunicate any bishop who discussed abuse cases outside of the church's legal system (Extra!, 7-8/08; FAIR Media Advisory, 5/13/08). Ratzinger's 2002 assertion that the scandal amounted to a persecution of the church--"I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign" (Zenit, 12/3/02)--was not quoted.

Both Douthat and Lawler are surprisingly critical of Pope John Paul II, long a hero to conservative Catholics, for protecting prominent pedophiles. This criticism would come across as more sincere if the record of the current head of the church were subjected to the same scrutiny.

Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/15/10) offers a "narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told," that ends with:

And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.

The idea that Saddam Hussein fooled the U.S. into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons is a very popular myth that has no real evidence behind it. (See Extra!, "Saddam's 'Bluff'"  by Peter Hart, 1-2/04; "From Speculation to History"  by Seth Ackerman, 5-6/04.) Needless to say, when you're complaining that a fictional film isn't factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren't fictional.

In Tuesday's New York Times online edition, the paper's neo-neo-con columnist Ross Douthat laid out a sprawling argument that seemed to conclude that pro-choice activists and the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling were responsible for violence against women's healthcare providers, including the murder of Dr. George Tiller last week.

"If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be," wrote Douthat, who argued that

One reason there's so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions--Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? --is that Americans aren't permitted to debate anything else.

Douthat elaborated on what seemed to be a plan for conciliation: "If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically," because "arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester--as many advanced democracies already do--would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions."

It is true that if you take away constitutional protections, people opposed to those protections will be happier. For instance, those rightists who called for jailing reporters who reported secret aspects of the Bush White House's warrantless wiretapping and black sites programs would probably be happier if the First Amendment were suspended to make such jailing possible. But what about the Constitution? And what about those who lost their protections? One begins to sense that Douthat's plan for reconciliation would only make one side happier.

It's also worth noting that, as much as Douthat may think they are all powerful,  pro-choice advocates are incapable of making concessions regarding the Constitution. Roe was "enshrined " by the U.S. Supreme Court, which will also be in charge of future decisions regarding its disposition.

But just when you thought Douthat's plan might be somewhat was lopsided, he explains how there really is something in it for the pro-choice people:

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases--and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

As Village Voice blogger Roy Edroso summed up the Times columnist's reconciliation plan, “So, see, Douthat gets the end of abortion on demand, and you heathens get killed less often by right-wing nuts; he's meeting you halfway.”

Megan, a blogger at Jezebel.com, put it slightly differently: “To sum up: If we just roll over, accept the end of abortion access and let them teach us about respect for human life, they won't kill any more abortion providers. Good to know whose hands Douthat thinks Tiller's blood is really on.”

Resisting the tide of "liberal blogger men" who "are thrilled with the New York Times' appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page," Katha Pollitt (Nation, 3/18/09) contrasts the fact that "Douthat is best known for his conservative Catholicism (abortion is murder, frozen embryos are children, contraception kills romance)," with such Times-approving quotes as "'Smart move,' says Matt Yglesias. Ezra Klein and George Packer agree he's 'brilliant.' At TheNation.com, Chris Hayes calls it a 'fantastic choice,' and Eyal Press looks forward to 'thoughtful commentary.'"

Examples of such "thoughtful commentary" include Douthat "on those pesky WMDs": "It goes without saying that [Saddam Hussein], too, is busy trying to acquire a nuclear bomb, to supplement his extensive collection of biological and chemical weaponry." Additionally, Pollitt finds that

Douthat seems unusually averse to engaging with women intellectually, even on perennial topics like abortion and birth control, where you'd think we'd bring something missing to the table--like an interest in our health, well-being, happiness, longevity, pleasure and ability to have some control over our lives. Instead, he engages Slate's Will Saletan on whether contraception would prevent enough abortions to make it worth expanding government funding.