The Comedy of Errors Continues

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The Coiney webplaces are announcing glad tidings. The ACCG's 57 page appeal brief is now available for your perusal and entertainment. Ancient Coin Collectors' Guild mouthpiece dealer Dave Welsh cannot contain his excitement:

This brief is a very important document, both because of the significance of this test case, and also because it is virtually a legal textbook on the subject of the State Department's biased maladministration of the 1983 CCPIA. Peter Tompa has done a superb job in creating this masterful exposition of the law and the many complex and thorny issues involved. His expertise and wisdom have never appeared to better advantage than in this brief. Clearly, his heart was really in this effort. Perhaps its most significant virtue (apart from completeness and accuracy) is its impressive clarity and readability.

I do not share his starry-eyed adulation of either this text or its author's abilities. The arguments used here differ in no substantial manner from the sad distorted statements which Peter Tompa has been pumping out through his blog. It is therefore not a particularly "masterful" exposition of the law. There are several places where it says things which are quite simply untrue, and I hope the appeal court will pull them up on that. This brief also still misses out the one thing that would save their case if they'd stepped back and looked at it at all intelligently (which I will of course have the greatest of pleasure sharing with the ACCG, but only the minute after they have definitively lost this case with no possibility to return to it). The ACCG is just completely losing touch with reality here. I'll expand on that at length when I have more time - and am less likely to get very, very angry than today. What an utter farce! Why can't these people just accept that they cannot go on collecting illegally exported coins from any country that takes their fancy, and that they need to start looking for more legitimate sources?

Vignette: The Masks are still on in this long-running Comedy of Errors.