Not that there's anything wrong with that

But John Roberts...definitely gay.

I got no problem with it, but it seems to have had an effect on others' "Little Generals." JUSTICE. SUUUUNDAY. TWOOOOOO. was full of red meat, but they seemed to have avoided the elephant in the room -- ya know, the actual nominee -- for...Chris Hitchens?!

The event reached its climax when William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights stomped onstage determined to deliver the evening's most bombastic attack line. Donohue was going to tell the crowd exactly who their enemy was, in no uncertain terms. He was going to name names. And so, in booming basso profundo, Donohue denounced "the atheist, anti-Catholic bigot" Christopher Hitchens. His salvo was greeted with befuddled silence. If there were a name with which the country-music-capital crowd had less familiarity, Donohue couldn't conjure it. For all they knew, if they knew anything about Hitchens, the neoconservative ex-Trotskyite bibulous Brit author of Letters to a Young Contrarian had produced a how-to manual in the style of James Dobson's "Dare to Discipline" for Christian parents to give to a naughty teenager evading an abstinence program.

Unfazed by the utter silence greeting his startling exorcism of the demon Hitchens, Donohue trundled ahead like a performance artist at the Greenwich Village Cafe Wha?. He declared that he studied under "the NYU Marxist Sidney Hook," evoking further deep bafflement in the crowd (NY Who?), then proposed "grief counselors" for liberals and finally posed a rhetorical question: "You remember that Bob Dylan song?" With that, the packed Baptist church turned into a Quaker meeting. It appeared that the Christian militants didn't recall "The Times, They Are A-Changin'." Maybe Donohue should have tried something from Dylan's early country phase, like "Lay, Lady, Lay."

Meanwhile, Zell Miller proved again that he's off his meds. "They've taken Jesus' halo." You can't make that up.

And Chuck Colsen, who found Jesus' halo in prison shortly after his first encounter with a bunkmate named "Tiny," intones

"The same people who supported King are against us," he said. That appeal to antipathy drew one of the few bursts of spontaneous applause of the evening.

Ignoring the obvious race-baiting, one can only reply, "Um, yeah, those same people who led the fight for civil rights are against nominees dead set at overturning civil rights, you Bible thumping idiot."

But still, no John Roberts.

Indeed, Justice Sunday II was about a lot of things -- still-simmering resentment against the civil rights movement, for example -- but it was hardly about John Roberts. As Donohue declared, "We need to go beyond Roberts."

Roberts's smiling visage was flashed on the church's big screen, but he didn't garner a ringing endorsement from Justice Sunday II's most prominent personality, James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family. "It looks like John Roberts is, and we think so, a strict constructionist," Dobson said during a videotaped appearance. "For now, at least, he looks good." Gone were the senators' phone numbers flashed across the screen during Justice Sunday I. Emcee Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was not urging viewers to dial their Congressman, as he did before. Justice Sunday II's planners pointedly neglected to present a giant-size portrait of Roberts beside the dais, as they did for each of Bush's stalled federal judiciary picks two months ago. Somewhere between his nomination and Justice Sunday II, John Roberts had become the redheaded stepchild in the Christian right's basement.

They wanna like Roberts. Preznit says he's looked in his heart and he's a good man. Family man. But there's something about him...Romer. Grrr.

But what I want my Congressman to ask John Roberts, what touch is he going to add to his robe?