I guess someone did rise to the boob bait after all, as Robert Novak is pleased to inform you:

Joseph R. Cerrell, a leading California Democrat and prominent Italian American, has called on Chairman Howard Dean to apologize to Federal Appellate Judge Samuel Alito for Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffers saying the Supreme Court nominee was weak in prosecuting the Mafia. Dean has not replied to Cerrell's Nov. 2 letter.

A DNC press release blasted Alito's record as a federal prosecutor in losing "a key conviction" that resulted in members of the Lucchese crime family being freed. "The staffers and the DNC must apologize to Judge Alito and to all Italian Americans" for "scurrilous tactics," Cerrell's letter said. He contended "this kind of behavior is beneath any standard of the Democratic Party that I have known."

Cerrell, a Los Angeles-based political consultant, is vice chairman of the National Italian American Foundation.

Cerrell seems like a loyal Democrat (and he's been working for the Dems since at least the JFK days), but he was a member of GOP governor Pete Wilson's Italian-American Task Force and he teaches at one of the Republican Party's favorite institutions of higher learning, Pepperdine University.

I'm guessing that Novak was alerted to this by his longtime source Karl Rove, who relishes and cultivates Judas behavior on the part of Democrats (remember, Rove brought you the 2004 GOP convention, with its raw-meat speeches by nominal Democrat Zell Miller and the formerly liberal actor Ron Silver). I wonder if Rove elicited (or even wrote) the denunciation himself.

(Link via Memeorandum.)