Word: pompously
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Unlike the president, Hillary Clinton has appeared cautiously aware of the consequences of insulting the pompous politicians on the Hill. By the Washington Post's count, she has met at least fifty times with members of Congress in both houses and both parties. With a mix of courtesy ("Yes, Congressman"), warmth (she hugged House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski) and blunt honesty (she warned legislators that sin taxes alone could not finance health care reform), she has generally won high marks and--more important--respect. While the president has made members of Congress feel isolated and ignored...
Marco Torres turns the pompous old Gonzalo into a raging queen. Campy as a row of tents, he injects humor without losing sight of his original character...
This hollow script wastes the cast's talent. Michael Skoler provides a fantastically annoying rendition of the pompous, self-important head of the department, Joe Taylor. Jonathan Weinberg pulls off a creepy portrayal of the randy theater buff Philip Brown with confidence. Erin Scott and Miriam Carroll admirably fulfill the roles of faculty wife and daughter respectively. At times, John Didiuk overdoes the drunken retired professor, Orson Baldwin. But the rest of the cast refrains from the seductive temptation to overact...
Nowhere is it more brilliantly manifested than in his lawcourt drawings: the pompous judges, the robed lawyers whispering their deals and making their pleas, the cavernous Piranesian spaces of the anteroom to the Palace of Justice known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, or Room of Wasted Steps, the frightened clients, the stone-faced ushers, the bewildered accused in the dock. It took another 19th century genius, Dickens, to convey in fiction what Daumier gives in line and wash: the sense of the law, not as a means toward fairness or justice but as an enormous and self-feeding machine...
...stake were the lives of nine employees at the Talladega federal prison, in Alabama, who were being held captive by a mob of prisoners armed with spears, knives and crossbows. Suddenly FBI Director William Sessions walked in and began marching around the room, "making noise, strutting around, being somewhat pompous, and engaging in non sequiturs," as one official recalls. Instead of dealing with the crisis at hand, the officials were forced to humor Sessions, who was oblivious to their nine days of planning. "He blew in at the 59th minute of the 11th hour," gripes another participant...