Word: mountebanks
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Jerry Brown, the flamed-out former California Governor, derided by Democratic insiders as a flake, a fake, a maverick and a mountebank, regained political legitimacy last week by edging out Clinton 37% to 36% in the Connecticut primary. "It's a miracle," Brown proclaimed. "It's not about me. It's about the grass roots rising up against the bounced checks, the congressional pay raises, the corrupt status...
...much a showman (with a touch of the mountebank) to stay in the king's role for very long. I have a theory that children of alcoholics make brilliant mimics, because reality and identity for them are unstable, subject to sudden disappearances and weird transformations. They are constantly auditioning nuanced identities in hopes of pleasing insanely unpredictable parents. At the kitchen table now, Bly becomes his spiritual and poetic mentor, William Butler Yeats, going trancey and reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree in a high Irish singsong, tone-deaf Yeats sliding up and down at the end of the line...
...interest in the story of an embittered, vengeful killer whose philosophy is "we all deserve to die." But if such a character can be engaging, then Tolins' Sweeney is engaging. Edwards' Mrs. Lovett is hilarious, as are Johnson's lascivious, foppish beadle and Arthur Fuscaldo's Pirelli, a mountebank rival barber. Wolman's judge is surprisingly sympathetic, and Michael Starr is strong as Tobias, Mrs. Lovett's fiercely devoted young shill...
...Johnson, normally an evenhanded fellow. He suggested in a column that Reagan's overwhelming support proved Abraham Lincoln wrong, that in this age of packaged candidates it was possible to fool all of the people all the time, or at least enough of the time to put a mountebank like Reagan in the White House...
...Rudolf Hess; then the "vain, pompous, incredibly stupid" Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was to be Foreign Minister. Shirer recalls being dumbfounded by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Education Minister, a bureaucratic ideologue who explained the difference between serious, careful, Aryan physics and the degenerate Jewish physics, as represented by the mountebank Einstein...