A coup might be a military one, under the pretext of stopping violence escalating in Bangkok.
But policing that process will almost certainly be a major headache for regulators in Brussels responsible for stopping governments from using crises as a pretext to support favored companies with unfair subsidies.
It is a different matter for party officials to openly look for a pretext to stop people from voting.
Speaking to the BBC before parliamentary elections in June, Mr Enkhbayar said the charges were a pretext to stop him running for political office.
"Don't let's look for pretexts to stop talking," the newly gung-ho Mr Netanyahu, past master of pretexts, ardently urged.
This is, however, Mexico, where, as the Nobel-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz once noted, "any occasion for getting together will serve, any pretext to stop the flow of time and commemorate men and events with festivals and ceremonies".
But the plaintiffs claim that the police use the program as a pretext to stop people who leave those buildings.
Carroll's vague justification for the stop — with its use of loaded but largely meaningless words like "slinking" and "peering" — thus served as a legal but all too typical pretext for a nighttime stop-and-frisk.
Alaska courts currently allow pretext investigative stops so long as a reasonable officer following permissible police practices could have made the stop for the proffered reason.
"Pretext Searches and Seizures: In Search of Solid Ground" by Jeff D. May, Rob Duke et al. Despite numerous attempts to subject the use of pretext law enforcement stops to Alaska Constitutional scrutiny, the issue has never been thoroughly reviewed.
For the poor, the American police are too often not guardians, but incarceration expeditors, using routine pedestrian and vehicle stops as a pretext for finding something bigger that can land someone in lockup.
