Word: mountebanking
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...prefers to voyage off to worlds that never were, and to return from them with his own devil-may-care impressions. To his admirers he is a restless, inventive, original genius. To his critics, including some of the other topnotchers in the school of Paris, he is a talented mountebank and irrepressible showman who has lured his followers and the world up a blind artistic and intellectual alley...
...Mencken, who cares for nobody, except for the laughs, the whole race looked satisfactorily scandalous. He described President Truman as a "shabby mountebank," Tom Dewey as a "limber trimmer," announced that Henry Wallace had manifestly lost "what little sense he had formerly, if indeed, he ever had any at all." He grudgingly admitted that Socialist Norman Thomas seemed to have some brains, but wrote him off immediately. He thought Dixiecrat J. Strom Thurmond was "the best of all the candidates," but with a final growl, he warned that "all the worst morons in the South...
Manuela (Judy Garland), engaged to a fat slob of a Caribbean mayor (Walter Slezak), is sure that a wandering mountebank (Gene Kelly) is the man of her daydreams, a pirate, legendary for dash and gallantry. Even when she learns that the actual pirate is the slob (retired), she sticks by the mountebank. When last seen, they're both clowning away to their hearts' content...
...Civil War. Hopping nimbly from region to region, Brooks lovingly sketches their literary manners-the rash of reform movements in New York, "attractional harmony and passional hygiene . . . water cure and Graham Bread"; the burly tall tales of the Far West where Joaquin Miller, "the greatest liar living . . . half a mountebank and all the time a showman," turned out crude, vigorous sketches of pioneer life; the sad whimsies of the post bellum South, where Constance Fenimore Woolson's "imagination lingered over the relics of the ancient South, the tumbledown battered houses and forlorn plantations...
Politics. The G.O.P. leaders also found time to plan a campaign against Democratic Senator Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo, the Mississippi mountebank (see PEOPLE). They had decided to challenge Bilbo's right to his Senate seat on the grounds that he incited whites to bar Negroes from the Mississippi polls in the Democratic primary...