Word: throttlebottom
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...electorate, and Wintergreen is soon President. But an international scandal explodes when the French Ambassador reveals that the spurned Miss Devereaux is "the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate son of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon." The President is impeached, with proceedings chaired by the comically anonymous Vice President Throttlebottom (Jefferson Mays, of I Am My Own Wife, in an endearing Mr. Cellophane turn). All is resolved when Mary announces she is pregnant, with twins. Posterity is just around the corner. Of thee I sing, babies...
...quote about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time, the boss snorts, "It's different nowadays. People are bigger suckers." (That got a conspiratorial roar from the opening night Encores! crowd.) Toward the end, Wintergreen lapses into candor when he confides to Throttlebottom the basics of White House governance: "Of course the first four years are easy. You don't do anything except try to get re-elected. ? The next four years you wonder why the hell you wanted to be re-elected." For our last two Presidents, that bit of wisdom might...
...President into a sexual triangle that leads to his impeachment, needs no footnote from me for its relevance to recent White House history. True, the image of a Vice President with neither power nor notoriety may seem anachronistic, not to say utopian, these days (though at the end, Throttlebottom does say to Wintergreen, in a neat presentiment of Maureen Dowd, "You can be the President and I'll go back to Vice.") But the pertinence of the show's disdain for the motives of the President, the Congress and the press carried a wallop then, and retain a sting today...
...fact, Moynihan is the Senate's most eccentric, brilliant and fearless purveyor of uncomfortable truth. He has probably shaped as much national social and economic policy in his 32 years in Washington in various jobs as any other person. "He may be viewed as a kind of Ivy League Throttlebottom," declared a wary admirer, "but he is formidable -- and absolutely necessary...
...librettists were Morrie Ryskind and, ironically, Kaufman, who despite his woes with satire kept at it anyway. The humor is neither as rich nor as heartfelt as in his You Can't Take It with You, but much of it still sings of us. About the choice of Alexander Throttlebottom as Vice President: "We put a lot of names in a hat. This guy lost." A Senator warning fellow hacks that the voters "love," "respect" and "honor" their party, but "they do not trust our party." A vow from the platform: "We appeal to your hearts, not your intelligence...