Word: pecksniff
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...Senate's clubbiness. It was as if he had 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...
...Dickens describes Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit as "a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copybook. Some people likened him to a direction-post, wnich is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there . . . His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat . . . and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. His person was sleek though free from corpulency...
...conservative Daily Telegraph stiffly noted that "the New Pecksniff and Nation" recently observed its silver anniversary by serving "champagne by the bucket" to a "seething, shrieking mass" of left-wing politicians and "statesmenlike women. Not the 'people at the top' perhaps; but where...
...dramatic pastiche from A Tale of Two Cities. Even much of the humor was secondbest. Williams did score a bull's-eye with a minor yarn, Mr. Chops. If a showman as gifted as Emlyn Williams ever goes to work on the great comic figures in Dickens -Pecksniff, Micawber, Sairey Gamp, Mrs. Jellyby, the Wellers-he should achieve a truly topnotch show...
Truman's speech, said Tarle, was "compounded of syrupy speculations." The U.S. President "resembled most the Dickensian Pecksniff. They have the same manner-alternating a fox's tail and a wolf's teeth . . . [Truman's] distinguishing trait is a rather disgusting simulation of sincerity, simplicity and good humor . . . [His true policy] is an appeal to force [concealed by] a mixture of oleaginous hypocrisy and disgusting boasting...