Holy Scalito!
By Jeff Koopersmith

"We've got the majority!" Pope Benny is a very happy camper today.

Oct. 31, 2005 / ROME (apj.us) / I haven't been this excited since the College of Cardinals picked a German as the stealth Pope, setting up St. Peter's for the coming (finally) of a good old fashioned Italian Pontiff a few years from now.

But who can knock George Bush's choice for the Supreme Court today: Italian "Scallion" Sam Alito, who will be yet another Catholic currently sitting on the Supreme Court, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin "Big Tony" Scalia and – believe it or not – Clarence Thomas. Thomas is a little problematic. Is he really a Catholic? He might be considered only one-half or two-thirds Catholic because he was born a Baptist, raised a Catholic, attended Episcopal Church and also the Seventh Day Adventist Church but now reclaims his Catholicism (most likely because he can read the box scores.)

And get our your Altoids, because Alito means "breath" in Italian, which the Holy Father believes is a "BREATH of fresh air" – but that National Abortion Rights Action League believes means "time to hold your BREATH."

As the Pope recalled from Ambrogio on Saint Luca: "Dio fece l'uomo con il fango della terra e alitò sul suo viso un soffio di vita…" (God made the man with the mud of the earth and breathed on its ace a breath of life.)

Uh Oh! Out goes Roe – in comes "Intelligent Design"!

Let me reveal that I am a reborn Catholic adopted and raised by a Jew and Buddhist. I do not suffer well my Christian evangelist friends or my Jewish evangelist friends – or any evangelist friends!

I do, however, adore the Catholic Church for it provides me comfort knowing its there and lots of lovely, statues, icons, paintings, stained glass and golden trinkets to look at while I worship. And most of all – it provides hope to the hopeless it serves around this earth.

Like most modern American Catholics I believe women should control their own bodies – but I also know how much it hurts them and their lovers to give up a potential human life when it comes down to that agonizing decision. I am not sure what Pope Benedict XVI believes in his heart of hearts, but publicly he surely does not approve of Roe v. Wade and thus is celebrating the nomination of Sam Alito – not only a Catholic, but the fifth Catholic who will sit on the United States Supreme Court if I know my Senate Committees.

For those of you in "red" states, this means that Catholics will now have a majority on the court.

Before all my liberal buddies get their hackles up, Alito is basically a good guy. He does his own grocery shopping. He's called "Scalito" by some because they say he's a little clone of Justice Scalia – but don't pay attention to that. He isn't. In fact, he may be the closest thing to Justice O'Connor the Democrats can get – they just don't yet realize it.

And as for the present German Pope: an Italian website that published a photo montage of Pope Benedict XVI dressed in a Nazi uniform was suspended from the Internet for offending the Roman Catholic religion, court officials said. This is where the Pope finds a certain kinship with Bush, as no other President has been portrayed in Nazi uniforms on the Internet (and elsewhere) more often than our own George W.

Roman prosecutors accused Indymedia Italia, which is part of a network of alternative media websites, of causing offense to the Catholic religion by publishing the photo montage alongside the caption "Nazi Pope".

Under Italian law, this offense is punishable by up to one year in jail. This is not the case in the United States. Here, when you embarrass the President, some guy named "Scooter" threatens your wife's life in a whispering campaign.

Bush's grandfather, once a former United States Senator from Connecticut and now long dead, was accused by the United States Government of playing financial footsie with the Nazi Party, so Bush must have a soft spot for the new Pope, the ex-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who now claims not only that his membership in Hitler Youth was compulsory but also that though he was drafted into a Nazi anti-aircraft unit, he never fired a shot.

Even Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter and director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is willing to give the Pope the benefit of the doubt, remarking, "Membership in the Hitler Youth doesn't disqualify someone from being Pope. If he had committed war crimes, the situation would be completely different. The issue is his record afterward, and he was never involved in any war crimes as far as we know."

But I digress.

The true concern among the most liberal voters today is whether Sam Alito might himself be a stealth "Nazi". After all, he is not pro-choice, he opined that it was okay for high school children to taunt gay men, and was a very tough prosecutor who didn't blink an eye in favor of defendants when at all possible.

In the end, however – because Alito is Catholic – I forgive him, and know that now that he will have a highly-paid and totally-worshipped life-tenure job on the highest court in the land, he will see whichever evil ways he may have adopted and move to left, as do all intelligent members of the Court (Justice Thomas).

Mr. Bush has scored big here. He has all his evangelical Neocons fooled into thinking Sam Alito is one of "them." Even Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman), whom Alito slapped with a stinging decision against a case Specter argued personally, will drop his lust for revenge and embrace Justice Alito without wincing.

Be sure that women activists and gay rights groups will be out in force protesting Alito's nomination. I suggest they soft-pedal it, doing only what they need do to placate their members. Alito is no Neocon. He is a sensitive man who has no agenda that Phuckups on the Family's SuperCreep Rev. Dr. James "Beat Your Brats" Dobson would approve of. After all, the big topic today in Dobson World is wrestling with whether or not Halloween should be one of their family's celebrated holidays.

Thank God someone is worrying about it.

Dobson writes, "Because Halloween can be traced to distinctly pagan sources, it is reasonable that many believers would find some aspects of its celebration disturbing. I agree with them in that regard."

Imagine Dobson coming before the Supreme Court for a ruling on his actual suggestions that children – in public schools – discover how they can transform a jack-o'-lantern into a faith lesson, or dress in costumes that focus on Bible heroes.

The question Dobson and his cronies should be asking themselves is, "What if we get what we want: a rollback to the 17th Century? Then how will we raise millions of bucks?"

What do you suppose Justice Alito would say about that?

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."