Word: humbug
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...With that bit of self-congratulatory humbug, Congress completed work on a budget that should have been finished three months earlier. For the second straight year, the legislators tossed all 13 appropriations bills into a massive single "continuing resolution" without which the Government would clank to a halt. This year's 2,300-page manuscript kept company with a "reconciliation bill" that detailed the tax hikes and spending cuts decreed by a White House-Congress summit last November to cut the deficit by some $76 billion over two years. Despite its elephantine size, the final product may have...
...following morning some 120 workers had donned red-and-white caps in protest, and they were consequently kicked out into the cold. Most of the suspended Santas held a rally outside the plant, singing Jingle Bells and flaunting signs that read OKONITE, HUMBUG...
...order, moral certitude, freedom from doubt. To him there is no deeper satisfaction than to be regarded as normal. His attitude echoes the values of a police state; when Road opened at Yale in 1984, then more effectively at Britain's National Theater in 1985, the pastor seemed a humbug, professing affection for an old friend while ruthlessly trying to have his way. In Charleston, Fugard directed and also played the pastor. He found great sympathy in the man and showed compassion for the common throng's yearning -- in this or any society -- for ritual pieties as an alternative...
...moment when President Reagan's own Yuletide fortunes were looking bleak. "This is our Christmas and New Year's message to the American people from the people of Nicaragua," said Ortega. "It is a message of peace, and couldn't be more concrete." Washington's response was Bah, humbug! "If the Sandinistas truly want to make a gesture," snorted State Department Spokesman Charles Redman, "it should be toward those in Nicaragua who oppose their oppressive policies...
...know where to begin," he opened one missive in 1950, and variations on this formula abound in his letters. He disarmed anger or outrage through self-castigation: "My selfish carelessness and unpunctuality I do not try to excuse as poet's properties. They are a bugbear & a humbug...