Shorter Ross Douthat: While some people call the actions of Mitt Romney’s Bain Gang a multi-state job killing spree for profit, I like to think of it as a benevolent culling of the herd before it is overpopulated with losers.

Shorter Ross Douthat: Someone should tell the stupid drum-pounding Occupy Wall Street hippies that the real 1% are those selfish bastards who want to protect workers rights and are trying to save the environment as if they think the Earth belongs to them or something.

Shorter Ross Douthat: The problem with America today is that we elevate too many self-regarding smarty-pants know-it-alls to positions of influence only to later discover they are way over their heads and…what? Did I say something funny? No. Really. What are you guys laughing at?

Shorter Ross Douthat: The Poors, the Olds, and the Workers need a champion of the common man to tell them to stop hurting America, and that man is Mitt Romney. Too bad the Times couldn’t provide Ross with a accompanying illustration like this one

In David Brooks latest he explains the good news, that Hard Times are making Americans into a grimly moral and introspective people given to thrift and self-denial as opposed to the frivolous life embracing people we once were who ran up our national credit cards on flatscreens,  the latest doodads from Apple, and the occasional [...]

Shorter Ross Douthat: As a society, it behooves us to satisfy America’s bloodlust with a human sacrifice every so often in order to remind ourselves of how fucked up our society is.

Speaking this morning of Rick Perry and Gardasil and HPV’s, Michele Bachmann certainly opened up a can of worms (I’m certain that there is a double-entendre that I am missing here, but I’m too tired to go searching for it) for conservatives who are suddenly infected with talking about women’s health, a subject they normally [...]

Shorter Ross Douthat : With notably rare exceptions, like the massacre of innocent children, people like that Norwegian guy have some valid concerns about the browns. Alternate Ross Douthat: Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism extremist genocidal tendencies, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.

  Shorter Ross Douthat: We’re have aborted so many girl babies that now there aren’t enough Chunky Reese Witherspoons in the world to satisfy our manly urges. Not that I have any.

  This is good news for Ross Douthat. Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed in the midst of the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Known incidents of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those [...]