NYT for Alito?

The NYT runs a lengthy article about Alito this morning. A very nice piece. Either Alito is a heckuva good man and the NYT is putting honesty above partisan politics or there's a fox in the hen house. I'm guessing the former. Excerpts:

An examination of several chapters in his life suggests he is conservative by temperament, upbringing and experience - conditions that appear to have shaped his approach to life and his work more than any narrow ideological niche.

"There are people in Washington who become a kind of tight political circle, in the sense of almost the secret handshake," said Douglas W. Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University who worked with Judge Alito in the office in the mid-1980's and became a close friend.

"I would put Sam and myself outside of that circle - not in the sense that we disagreed with anything in particular but that we were less willing to sign on for the fraternity," he said. "The one thing about fraternities is that they take on missions or causes that may be all right in themselves but you have to sign onto them in advance. Neither of us, by personality, would want that." . . .

As for his Roman Catholicism, Professor Kmiec said Judge Alito rarely brings it up.

"I think faith for Sam is a regularizing experience in the sense of bringing order to the world," said Professor Kmiec, who is also Catholic. "It's a community in which you obligate yourself to others and therefore feel part of something that's outside of yourself. I think that understanding of faith is not much different from the understanding of faith that I would bet that Rose and Sam Alito, his parents, had."