Tread Water

Dahlia Lithwick on today's hearings:

John Roberts is putting on a clinic.

He completely understands that he needs only to sit very quietly, head cocked to signal listening-ness, while senator after senator offers long discursive rambling speeches. Only when he's perfectly certain that a question has been asked does he offer a reply; usually cogent and spare. Here's a man long accustomed to answering really hard questions from extremely smart people, suddenly faced with the almost-harder task of answering obvious questions from less-smart people. He finds himself standing in a batting cage with the pitching machine set way too slow.
[...]
in the end, these hearings are perfectly matched. Roberts wants to say little and literally fade to black. The senators want to give speeches and seize the limelight. It's a match made in heaven. It's just the watching it that's hell.