Pomp.
Posturing.
"Playing the devil's advocate."
Alluding.
Prying.
Weaseling.
Soapboxing.
Listening to yourself pontificate.
Pretending to give a rat's ass.
Cutting off.
Asking dumb, dead-ended questions.
Asking unanswerable questions.
Playing smart, yet looking like a jack-ass.
Running out of time.
Quibbling about Stari Decisis.

These are all phrases or quips that can accurately describe what happened today in 226 Dirken Senate Office Building during the Samuel Alito judicial hearing today.

One of our worst offenders is Joe Biden of Delaware. He's not the dumbest person on the committee, but he should be smarter in his approach to this most important opportunity to show the American public that Alito is one scary dude. Biden basically came off like he was going to use all of his time to ramble on about employment cases that common sense should tell him that Alito won't comment much on - things most people have forgotten about and have trouble getting interested in.

Another most detestable performance came from Lindsey Graham. This chap had his "set-up" questions for Alito such as, "Are you aware of any court cases in American history where.....?" Of course, Alito would mumble something such as, "Well, unless you give me more indication, no I cannot recall these specific cases." Wherein Graham would cut in and say, "Well, actually Judge Alito, even though you cannot recall any examples at the top of your head, there are THREE. And I will tell you about them.."

Madness. It seems like it would be a better use of Graham's time to just state, "So, there are three cases in American History where x, y, and z occured. Can you comment on those?" He just wasted 2 minutes setting that up and later he managed to get cut off by Arlen Specter for going over. What a complete douche-bag (*Dickie) approach to it all in my book.

Alito handled the interrogation so well. I gotta give him some major points for handling himself the way he did - in over three hours he didn't break down and say something unforgivably stupid. Sure, he said, "I don't know" or "I am not fully aware or an expert..." a couple times, but that's honest. He may be a conservative nut-case under all that boring lameness, but he can handle the grilling, which I respect at a level.

This will go on all week, so stay tuned, and listen for Nina Totenberg and Ari Shapiro's coverage on NPR.