OPINION:
My all-American sonic-bombast weapon of choice for 50 years has been those world-class pieces of musical art, the mighty Gibson guitar. I own a stunning arsenal of them. It wouldn’t surprise me if some Fedzillastooge from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s Department of Gunrunning Injustice will try to tell us American guitarslayers that we can only buy one fully automatic Gibson guitar a month.
Gibson guitars reportedly ran afoul of Uncle Sham’s Lacey Act, which is one of the most overreaching, bizzaro, contemptuous laws in the history of the United States.
Armed federal agents raided two Gibson guitar plants looking for allegedly illegally obtained wood from Madagascar and India. The Lacey Act permits the feds to prosecute U.S. companies who the feds believe have violated another country’s wood laws.
Essentially, it boils down to this: Gibson and other companies can legally import ebony wood from Madagascar if the wood has been “finished.” According to the Lacey Act, if the wood is imported in raw form from Madagascar or India, that is a violation.
Got that? Word has it that the same mind freaks who engineered the U.S. tax code also authored the Lacey Act. Oh, and they penned the best of the Grateful Dead songs, too.
It can’t get anymore bizzaro than this unless Fedzilla drops LSD and starts writing and passing some Cass Sunstein-inspired human-animal marriage laws.
Gibson settled with Fedzilla in order to keep from spending millions to defend itself against Uncle Sham who can borrow unlimited resources from China to harass American companies and individuals.
By anyone’s standards of fairness, what Mr. Holder’s gang of federal prosecutors did to Gibson was naked harassment that cost Gibson millions of dollars in lost production.
The feds have the unlimited power, resources and volumes of arcane laws, regulations and requirements to go after any company or individual they so choose, including prosecuting American companies the feds believe have violated another country’s timber laws.
This mindless abuse of Gibson by the heavy hand of the out-of-control federal government is a perfect reason why millions of Americans believe the corrupt, abusive power of Fedzilla needs to be reined in.
Meanwhile, it has just been reported that Fedzilla is not expected to file charges against former executives such as prominent Democrat John Corzine at the now defunct MF Global, where a billion dollars of investor cash just disappeared. Surprise, surprise.
The feds spent who knows how many millions of our tax dollars prosecuting retired baseball pitcher Roger Clemens for some erroneous and dumb reason such as throwing spitballs at Congress. Mr. Clemens beat the feds.
Even rarer than unfinished Madagascar ebony is when Uncle Sham goes after one of its own because of obvious and intentional fraud, waste and abuse of our hard-earned tax dollars.
While America’s finances are sliding into oblivion, the General Services Administration spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on junkets to places like Las Vegas. Yet hardly any federal employees are ever prosecuted or even fired.
Fedzilla has a license to steal and does so routinely. Our federal government makes Bernie Madoff look like a two-bit, petty criminal.
You could read for days on the Internet example after example of the fraud, waste and abuse of our tax dollars at the hands of Fedzillacrats gone mad.
Once President Romney is elected, I want him to put a commission together to identify dumb laws that serve no purpose other than to harass American citizens and businesses, and then to eliminate these laws and all the knuckle-dragging bureaucrats associated with them. I recommend this commission start with the Lacey Act. My arsenal of Gibson guitars would howl in delight.
Support American jobs and businesses. Buy a Gibson guitar and throttle some good old American R&B love songs of defiance.
Ted Nugent is an American rock ’n’ roll, sporting and political activist icon. He is the author of “Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto” and “God, Guns & Rock ’N’ Roll” (Regnery Publishing).
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