Word: claghorning
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...some particularly weird moment in the latest installment of the Great American Melodrama, I had a consoling thought: well, at least it can't get any worse than this. Maybe it was when Howell Heflin, playing Senator Beauregard Claghorn, was in the midst of some bloviation, the point of which seemed to have escaped him. Or maybe it was when Orrin Hatch, playing Perry Mason, revealed that a key piece of evidence, a pubic hair, actually appeared on page 70 of The Exorcist and therefore couldn't possibly have been in Clarence + Thomas' Coke...
...enjoy replaying the fiasco of the Thomas confirmation hearings: primal, defining national theater. The drama had layers -- legal, political, cultural, racial, ethical, sexual. The hearings were a bad moment for middle-aged white men. The Senate Judiciary Committee sat arrayed in its Caucasian glory, like Muppets of Bomfog and Claghorn, each Senator more confused and senescent and miserable and lost to pomposity than the last -- a row of flushed egos that said goodbye to dignity and intelligence sometime during the Eisenhower years...
Ervin's consistent conservatism made him acceptable to Senators of both parties when the Watergate committee was created. The country, eager for some displays of frankness and humanity, was cheered as the commonsensical Claghorn scolded and probed weaselly White House witnesses. His indignation provoked, his jowls wagging, Ervin offered up biblical allusions and down-home anecdotes, chortling and then fuming. "I think that Watergate is the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered," he said. "I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember some redeeming features in the Civil...
...crated up his Raleigh TV scripts, driven five hours north, and started pitching those editorials into the Senate hopper. If anyone took notice, it was generally with a snickering glance: Helms the flailing buffoon, a crossbreed of Dickens' Pecksniff and Fred Allen's Claghorn, full of futile cracker righteousness. Yet in Aide John Carbaugh's phrase, Helms "planted the flag": his hopeless proposals sometimes forced Senators to take stands on issues they would have just as soon avoided. He introduced numberless bills to stop abortions, to prohibit sex education, to reinstate capital punishment. All lost, by ratios...
...Mendel mystique" and his role as protector of the military installations that were his godfather's legacy to the district. Limehouse, who goes about coatless and tieless and shows up at Democratic rallies to hand out free soft drinks, accuses Davis of being "pure old Southern Claghorn...