"Now, young Skywalker, you will die..."

Rather than remark on the already-played-out similarity between the new Pope and the Emperor from the Star Wars saga, I offer some Google figures (call it metablogging):

Google hits on terms [Ratzinger Palpatine] = 178
Google hits on terms [Benedict Palpatine] = 1,240
Google hits on term ["Pope Palpatine"] = 128

The extremely high figure for "Benedict" and "Palpatine" is undoubtedly inflated by false positives, probably message board discussions of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica (starring Dirk Benedict).

UPDATE

The above was posted Thursday, April 21st. New figures (as of Monday 4/25):

Google hits on terms [Ratzinger Palpatine] = 645
Google hits on terms [Benedict Palpatine] = 869
Google hits on term ["Pope Palpatine"] = 2,420

Wow. The jumps for the first and third result are impressive, but the drop in hits for the "Benedict" and "Palpatine" terms is interesting as well.

Quick, check out the Wikipedia page for Pope Benedict XVI.