I swear to GOD, Tweety compares choice of new Pope to Bush picking Cheney [View All]

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

I think this new pope, just on a very cosmetic level, is amazing. He's 78 years old. I remembered him being talked about when we studied Vatican II back at the Holy Cross in the 60s. Ratzinger was a major figure. And here he is now radiant, looking strong, solid... what a leader he looks like.

It first struck me when we covered the funeral ceremony two Fridays ago: He gave a wonderful homily and how the crowd reacted to it. I sensed a resonance then between him as the friend of the late pope, and the crowd, loving of the pope. There was a togetherness there. So maybe his election isn't a surprise. It didn't take him long to get past the 77 he needed to win.

The other thing that struck me— and this is not a knock— but a parallel: Remember when our President George W. Bush was looking for a vice-president? He interviewed to all these young men and women. In the end, he came back to Dick Cheney, the man he had put in charge of the search committee. It seems to me the cardinals must have looked around the world, and they stopped and realized that they had a great guy right here… the Dean of the College Of Cardinals, and he's perfect for the job.

There's a lot of other factors that led to his election, I'm sure. There are many Europeans in the College of Cardinals. The conservatives won, and there's no surprise there. But what's also interesting is that Ratzinger picked the name Benedict. The last pope Benedict was Pontiff during World War I. And there hasn't been a German pope in hundreds of years. And here he is, the new Pontiff saying, "I want to have the as name as a pope who tried to bring peace in World War I... before any of the hell of the 20th century, when the world could have been a more peaceful place." So that his name which connotes “peacemaker” is so interesting.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7548457/#050419a