We hear the word awfully regularly and perhaps too often: loophole.
Regular users of this word include bankers, car dealers, and lawyers. But the most common users are politicians.
Politicians are those sub-humans that have two distinctive traits that always give themselves away. One, is that when their lips are moving, they are lying. The second trait is that when their lips aren’t moving, they’re smiling. Two dead giveaways.
Whether making pious speeches about gun violence, drug influx, preserving rights for the homeless, encouraging illegal entry into America, or releasing hardened criminals from incarceration, politicians usually reach into their velvet bag of sleazy words to help slither their way out of the truth.
Inside that bag are notes with words such as: racist, misogynist, “I can’t recall,” “I don’t believe so,” and “loophole.” These are “wiggle words” permitting tattoos of arrogance to disappear before the eyes of the world.
Years ago, Our Lady of Perpetual Grievances, St. Hillary Clinton, was caught with a hammer in her grubby hands, breaking her cellphones into teeny weeny pieces. It seems as though she was suspected of nefarious activities to include having foreign sources create and distribute fictitious documents.
Those documents which contained phony accusations against her once close friend, Donald Trump, including his “collusion” with Russians who supposedly had clout. All a giant lie aimed at hobbling Trump in order to punish him for telling the truth.
At a Congressional trial, Clinton, often touted as “The World’s Smartest Woman,” used the words, “I don’t recall,” or a variation thereof, hundreds of time. Pretty convenient. That’s an example of a loophole.
The long and short of it is the ability to tell an overt lie and get away with it while the world watches. The official definition of loophole is: “an ambiguity or inadequacy in the law or a set of rules.”
So, to avoid criminal or civil prosecution for lack of candor, a person on the stand in court can defer to a poor memory; who’s to know if one’s mind in unable to remember? Then it’s on to more shenanigans back in the office until the next subpoena.
But it’s the mother of all escape routes, the “loophole,” that we’re going to examine right now.
A cousin to ‘I can’t recall,’ the loophole is a terrific toll for the smarmy politician to blame their shortcomings – or intentional escape route – when writing and introducing bills.
For example, politicians are always in the game for votes. Votes are needed to get elected as well as remain elected. To do so behooves the politician who would rather loaf around their multiple offices than put on a pair of gloves and perform manual labor.
In order to win those precious votes, incumbents resort to giveaways in the form of benefits. Free child school meals, free bus tickets, coupons for electric vehicles, house down payment assistance, free cell phones, monthly cash and food stipends for the underprivileged, even student loan repayments for the wealthy.
None of the criteria make sense, though. Electric vehicle (EV) coupons offer thousands of dollars to
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| An EV wealth redistribution effort in the form of a loophole |
people well-off enough to afford a $75,000 - $100,000 EV without extra funding or help. Middle income families are now footing the bill for these bonus dollars that amount to wealth redistribution.
The same holds true for gratis bus tickets, cell phones, and other cash stipends for illegal aliens and American underprivileged folks, alike.
But as of late, politicians – on both sides of the aisle – have been carping over guns. Not only guns, but those guns in the hands of individual citizenry. Guns, they say, are just fine in the hands of police and the military, because they have been trained in their use.
Crazy talk from political baboons who have never held nor touched a real gun are circling their wagons in an attempt to outlaw firearm technology that is roughly a century-and-a-half old. Created around the time of Reconstruction, inventors tested and manufactured firearms for a variety of uses known as “semi-automatic.”
After 90-years since the federal government created the National Firearms Act of 1934 – a law that limited public ownership of fully-automatic firearms – this law, and the firearms and accessories associated therewith, continue to be debated.
Subject to that debate is a relatively new product called a “bump stock.” A bump stock is an inanimate device using the recoil action from a bullet discharge. Normally absorbed by the shooter’s shoulder in long guns, the recoil alters the rearward motion against the shoulder to be directed toward the shooter’s finger.
That stationary finger, in conjugation with the bump stock, is now being closely examined by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE). It seems as though some mentally ill guy bought semi-automatic rifles and fitted them with completely legal bump stocks. He proceeded to shoot hundreds of innocent concert and festival goers in Las Vegas, for no apparent reason.
Politicians immediately lined up as if someone yelled “Free meal!” to offer their opinions to the world.
“Loopholes! We need to immediately close the loopholes on bump stocks! They’re dangerous!!!” they piously yelled, ad nauseam. Of course they’re not dangerous; the finger pulling the trigger belongs to the guilty party in this equation.
Catching the attention of other even less-knowledgeable pols, they finally decided to outlaw these stocks with then-President Donald Trump signing the authorization bill. Naturally it was challenged in court after court after court. It is now in the hands of the Supreme Court.
Not unlike watching a jellyfish attempt to climb a ladder, The Justices appear flabbergasted, admittedly turning to YouTube for advice about exactly how a bump stock functions. (As an aside: I’ll wager they still don’t have a clue.)
For the record, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was baffled when asked about the definition of a ‘woman,’ not string theory. She publicly stated, “It’s really not about the operation of the thing. It’s about what it can achieve, what it’s being used for… The function of this trigger is to cause this kind of damage, 800 rounds a second or whatever,” per Fox News. Yes, she said 800 rounds per second! Quite the eye for detail that could affect more than 500,000 current non-criminal owners of these stocks.
This should come as no surprise, though. The legality, or illegality, of the bills under review are penned by the very people – lawyers/Senators/Congresspeople, most of whom have law degrees – who actually wrote them. But as is evident, they’re not worth the paper on which they are written. That’s because they are chock full o’ loopholes.
I’m not condemning these political gasbags, but they might want to know there are already in excess of 22,000-gun laws on the books to prevent gun crimes. Any new bills will likely contain new loopholes for future media attention following the next crime. That being said, what makes you think this bill will prevent anything?
Of course, we know the answer: nothing will prevent the illegal use of guns. Our British brethren fought a mediocre fight a handful of years ago by outlawing most firearms in the name of public safety.
Just within the last few weeks, English lawmakers began scribing a new bill to outlaw knives due to the out-of-control crimes being committed with knives. Soon it will outlaw cricket bats, cast iron skillets, and sharp sticks, all in the name of public safety.
Perhaps its not the knives, machetes, hatchets, hammers, poisons, cars, or guns. Maybe it’s simply crazy people – people that are mentally deficient and/or evil. That’s where I’d concentrate my efforts.
But I’m not a media whore like our politicians.
