Word: figs
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...exact words. Yes, the press secretary told the President, Kennedy had said the oil lobby intimidated Carter into "throwing in the towel" on decontrol without even "entering the ring." Yes, Kennedy had accused Carter of submitting a token windfall profits tax that was no more than a "transparent fig leaf over vast new corporate profits...
Carter was steaming. Kennedy's criticisms were usually much more carefully phrased. The President looked at Powell and brusquely said that was a lot of baloney. A few minutes later, to Powell's surprise, Carter repeated the same comment to the press corps. Thus began the great fig leaf and baloney...
When the patience of many workers, dismayed at having traded three years of wage restraint for the sterility of the Callaghan program, erupted into the disastrous strikes this past winter, the one fig-leaf covering the Labour government--their claim to be able to 'manage' the unions--had disappeared. There was little left to fight for, and long before election day, the Labour faithful were demoralized by the party's failure to present a radical alternative to the Tory challenge...
Moscow insisted upon describing the invaders as "the revolutionary armed forces" of the Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS), a band of Cambodian rebels rounded up by Hanoi last month. Few observers were misled by this disguise, however, KNUFNS is little more than an organizational fig leaf designed to conceal an attempt to unseat the virulently anti-Vietnamese Cambodian government. Among KNUFNS' promises: to re-establish banks and private ownership, restore family life and abolish "compulsory marriage." Still, broadcasting such attractive ideas may have little influence on Cambodia's heavily supervised and rusticated population: there...
...doesn't give a fig for the shipyard. "I don't care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over." In cocaine, of course--Chet is what Raymond Chandler used to call a cokey, and Panama's prose comes to you through the paranoid fog of a rolled Benjamin Franklin...