flubdub

How any sensible man, after reading the highfalutin flubdub of its sacred Kloran, the burlesque of its ritual and the list of its officers, from Imperial Wizard through the Klakard and the Kludd, the Kleagle and the Klarago, can hold his membership is beyond the range of sane judgement ...

thought, had "no more backbone than a chocolate eclair," and concerning Oliver Wendall Holmes, he observed, "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone." The portly William Howard Taft escaped any reference to food, but fares no better: "a flubdub, with a streak of the second-rate and the common in him." Still, for all these quarrels, we get very little sense of what it is that Roosevelt himself stood for when he launched his Bull Moose campaign in 1912.