Like Dubya? You're a wife-beating, gun-toting nut!

At least that's what Cragg Hines thinks. In today's column, the Chron political columnist tries to paint Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito as a far-right-wing wacko, while slapping the president's supporters with the same brush:

IF you like machine guns, you'll love Sam Alito.

Nice to know we're starting off with a good, healthy dose of rabid fear-mongering.

In upholding a restrictive Pennsylvania abortion law in 1991, even the increasingly conservative 3rd Circuit refused to go along with one of the legislatively approved provisions: to require a woman to notify her spouse, in almost all instances, before an abortion. To emphasize his position, Alito wrote a dissent to spell out his approval of the spousal-notice section. The Supreme Court said on review that the provision would impermissibly give a man "the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children." So, all you women who want to be ordered about like the kids, sit down right now and urge your senator to get aboard the Alito bandwagon.

But what's that compared to a president's need to restore his political health with about the only constituency that's sticking with him amid a mounting death toll in Iraq, an energy crisis and the indictment of Republican chums Tom DeLay and Scooter Libby?

Got that? 43% of American adults are machine-gun-toting, spouse-stomping extremists. Probably racist, sexist, homophobic evangelical Christian supremicists, too. But at least those 43% don't print ethnic slurs in major metropolitan newspapers:

Alito, a rock star to conservatives who scuttled Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers, is so in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, Bush's archetype of a supposedly strict-constructionist justice, that he's known as "Scalito" � little Scalia or Scalia lite.