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As a lawyer I appreciate what he is doing. He is making the dims INSANE. He is cleverly telling them he is a conservative without creating any headlines that can be used against him. His round about way of expression can be deciphered, but cannot be conveyed.

Bottom line: He gets confirmed and is one of the most conservative CJs in history.

My problem with the law profession is that it teaches people how to be clever in a deceptive way. Literal truths trump all, regardless of any motive to deceive. See, I view the truth much broader than that. Intentionally misleading or deceiving is the same thing as a lie. Sorry to slam your profession, but that's how it looks to me. So yeah, Roberts is being very clever and will receive a great deal of praise for this. Truth be told, it is probably the single quality that has allowed him to rise to the top of his profession so quickly. I just find that sad.

Do they ever talk of developing self-governing virtues in law school? Or is winning the only virtue that counts?

Lawyer mentality gave us "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." Mr. Drop-pants chose a verb tense that made what was literally true almost universally misunderstood. Everyone thought he meant one thing -- intentionally -- while only he and his lawyer knew what he literally meant. That's what this reminds me of. If you can't trust plain english during confirmation hearings, then how can you know that the guy will accept the plain english of our Constituion and laws?

I am also a lawyer and I tend to agree with your assessment. One thing I noticed early about Roberts is that he seems always to leave himself an escape hatch. Now, I have had to carefully study and parse some of his statements several times to find the escape hatch, but I have always found one. Some of the Democrat senators who were cross-examining him today seemed to intuit that he was not giving them the unequivocal answer that at first blush they thought they were getting, but when they pressed the point he deftly pirouetted and left them standing in the same place they started.

I hope this means he will be just as stalwart in a conservative sense as Scalia and Thomas once he gets on the Court. I shudder to contemplate the other possibility: that he left himself escape hatches but will never use them.