August is like the third or fourth kid in the calendar family.
Theoretically, it gets all the attention of its sibling months, but, inevitably, if unintentionally, it tends to live on the periphery of the spotlight, not to mention the limelight, that bathes the eleven others.
January..how about Times Square, ball dropping, party on, Garth....not mention a little pigskin, punt, pass and kicking get together known as ....the....Super.....Bowl.....I mean, hello....
February...three words, Benjamin.....Valentine's. Day. Chocolate.
March...thanks to that snake banishing superstar, St. Patrick, malts and hops, in an assortment of colors, flow like the uber healthy bladder of a teenager...
April...Tax Day tries to buzzkill, but, those sweet 'showers' and, for many, the main mama of all rocks rolled away from tombs make April a family fave....oh...not to mention three words, Benjamin.....Easter. Bunny. Chocolate.
May...probably comes closest to the obscurity that August endures, but, hey, if nothing else, we're talkin' the psychological, if not official, "start of summer"....surf's up, dudes....
June...four words, Benjamin (courtesy of Alice)....school's. out. for. summer.
July...well, if the spectacular, sparkling explosions filling the night sky over the nation's Capitol don't rattle your heart's windows, July also marks the first real opportunity we have to fulfill that nasty yearly health insurance deductible with that hurried race to the ER in an effort to get one or more of those fingers reattached....courtesy of unwise fuse lighting decisions involving Black Cats....
September...Labor Day ..symbolically, the end of summer ("boooooo", said the kids)....officially, the beginning of the new school year ("yaaaaaaay", screamed the parents....)....
October....again, need we even bother with two more words when...."chocolate" sums in up like Jamie Lee screaming down the block? okay, here's two other words...pumpkin. spice.... Sorry you couldn't let it go with chocolate, now, aren't ya.....
November...the first of the two calendar kids who are, regardless of what anybody says and/or denies, the "favorites"....after all, turkey...and stuffing/dressing....mashed potatoes....pie.....not to mention more punt, pass and kicking....and hey......again, HELLO.....giant SNOOPY floating through downtown Manhattan???
and, of course.....
December...frankly, it's embarrassing to think we even have to think about listing anything here....but, if you insist, December, obviously, brings with it the family tradition that supersedes and usurps all the other family traditions, hands down, no joke, we ain't kiddin......the kabillion hours long marathon repeat showings of "A Christmas Story"..... up on the housetop, I triple dog dare ya....down through the chimney...only to end up shootin' your eye out.....
Meanwhile....alas, poor August.
Summer? Mostly only dog days.
Any possibility of a holiday we could justify and/or rationalize copious candy consumption? Not likely given that the fifth through the eleventh is "National Smile Week' and nothing yanks the reins in on Reese's Cups like seven days of focus on good dental hygiene.
Of course, there is the 3rd, which is National Watermelon Day. But our parents only got away with that crap they pulled about watermelon being a "dessert" until we got wise...sometime around two years old, give or take.
Now, admittedly August holds its own in the calendar pecking order when it comes to 'historical observances.
6th, 1945....the first atomic bomb persuaded Japan to rethink their plan to expand their borders.
6th, 1965....the Voting Rights Act passed....permanently awarding that right to everyone who was qualified....'permanently' as in, right up until MAGA went from fad to standard operating procedure and its mob members realized that titanic turnouts almost always mean sinking ships...
16th, 1896...the first Gold Rush....of course, that sort of faded into the history books once Black Friday came along and the Canadian Yukon took a back seat to every Wal Mart and Target from sea to shining sea....
and the 21st, 1959...Hawaii became the 50th state in the Union....yeah, okay....except that things being what they are these days, the term "union" is fast becoming an oxymoron....and a case can be made that had Hawaii remained a distant paradise, we mainlanders would never have had to dealt with this pineapple on the pizza profanity.....
Still, years of being a bastard calendar stepchild notwithstanding, August 2024 promises to be a spotlight/limelight grabber in a bigly way.
Hold that thought.
We'll save the date shortly.
Paul Blumenthal is a senior reporter for the Huffington Post, his primary area of attention being politics.
He posted a piece this weekend on what the (inevitably) overly melodramatic headline offers is "Donald Trump's Most Dangerous Argument Yet".
Here's some excerpts.
Donald Trump is trying to quash his indictment for the attempt to steal the 2020 election by arguing before a federal appeals court that presidents have an “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution, even after leaving office.
Trump’s claim of absolute immunity comes in the federal case charging him with four felony counts related to his efforts to overturn his reelection loss that led up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The former president also faces a state prosecution in Georgia over attempts to steal the state’s election, a federal case related to illegally taking classified documents, and a trial in New York over hush money payments to a porn actor.
In his appeal in the federal election theft case, Trump makes two arguments. The first is that he has permanent absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any acts undertaken during his presidency. The second is that under the theory of double jeopardy, he cannot face criminal charges for acts upon which he was impeached but not convicted.
“The structure of our government, the text of the Constitution and its early commentators, common-law immunity doctrines, our political history, the Supreme Court’s analogous immunity doctrines, and the policy considerations rooted in the separation of powers all dictate that no President, current or former, may be criminally prosecuted for his official acts unless he is first impeached and convicted by the Senate,” Trump’s appeal brief states.
But his arguments run counter to centuries of judicial precedent and constitutional interpretation, as well as the intent of the Constitution’s authors and the very conception of the United States as a democratic republic governed by the rule of law enshrined in a constitution.
Aside from flying in the face of the nation’s history and system of government, both of Trump’s arguments would create perverse incentives for presidents to break the law to stay in office, and for their partisans in Congress to immunize them from criminal prosecution by impeaching but not convicting them.
“The defendant’s sweeping immunity claim threatens to license Presidents to commit crimes to remain in office,” Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith argued in a brief filed with the appeals court last week.
Under this theory, a president would be immune from prosecution if they directed “the FBI Director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy” or instructed “the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics,” according to Smith’s brief. And a president could avoid an impeachment conviction by “inciting his supporters during a State of the Union address to kill opposing lawmakers—thereby hamstringing any impeachment proceeding—to ensure that he remains in office unlawfully.”
Taken to its most extreme logical conclusion, the theory would allow President Joe Biden to abduct Trump and hold him in a black site prison or kill him, and potentially face no legal consequences, as Huff Post’s S.V. Date writes.
That last example, however absurd it might seem to the average knee jerker, brings a specific and critically important matter into focus.
The rule of law. What is essentially the foundation upon which "the Republic" stands.
And the question that has historically never been asked, let alone answered.
Finally coming around to being asked.
And absolutely in need of a written in stone, no bullshit allowed answer.
Is anyone....A N Y O N E.....above the law?
Actor Bill Mumy, famous for his childhood work on "The Twilight Zone", "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and his teen years as "Will Robinson" as in "....danger, Will Robinson" in the hit Sixties series, "Lost In Space", is a Facebook friend. Artistic and articulate, Bill often coda's his sharings with what has become a sort of 'unregistered trademark'....
"time", he offers, "is a bizarre river."
As does the legendary Smokey Robinson, I "second that emotion".
And Bill's insight strikes a particularly poignant chord for me this new year.
This year I turn seventy three.
Which means, of course, that I am currently living out that seventy third year.
And while it's not exactly Robert Frost poetic, a commonly recognized phrase has taken up, of late, some rental space in my synaptics.
"...I know a thing or two....because I've seen a thing or two..."
While it's reasonable to realize that every life, once it passes a certain age, can lay claim to having experienced things that past generations have not, it's equally reasonable to counter that there are a number of things that have occurred as I've traveled through certain sections of Mr. Mumy's 'bizarre river' that count as "firsts", more accurately "unusual, unique....even once in a lifetime" kinds of things....
Among entries of occurrence in my particular personal travelog....
...the Twenty Second Amendment, limiting a president to two terms....an amendment that is almost surely currently living in the crosshairs of victims of tanning salon overdoses and bad orange comb overs.....
...the first conviction and execution of a civilian couple for committing espionage....the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, not to be confused with Fred and Ethel who were seemingly law abiding but, ironically, these days are surely better known....
...the first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, named after the sinister ship in Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"....
...the election of the first Catholic to the office of President of the United States....a world shaking event superseded less than three years later by....
...the assassination of the first Catholic elected to the office of President of the Unites States...a world shattering event that some suggest, from which, the nation, at least, has never fully recovered...
...the passage of the first comprehensive Civil Rights Act....putting on paper and into law, a set of moral guidelines that, arguably, made so much that was wrong right...and, irrefutably, should never have been necessary in the first place...
...the landing of the first human beings on the Moon... one small step for a man...one giant leap for mankind...and, most heatedly in the past ten years or so, still doubted or disbelieved by a large enough number of, theoretically, "intelligent Americans" to be of grave concern for the future of mankind....
...the first American President to resign from office...disgraced, after being all but convicted of approving a third rate burglary in order to gain an advantage over political opponents....and an extraordinary example of 'bad timing'....for had Richard Nixon run in 2016 as opposed to 1968/72, he could have not only scored four years in the Oval, he could have enjoyed the luxury of showing off classified documents to all his peeps, gotten big laughs making fun of disabled reporters, relaxed from the stress of office by grabbing the occasional pussy and, of course, skipped over the silly "enemies list" he was known for and moved right on to the "send the mob down the street and burn the building with the big dome on it right to the ground.....oh...and hang Agnew..."....tough luck, Dick....
...the election of the first black to the office of President of the United States....an obviously historic occasion which will, sadly, almost tragically, be remembered in generations to come as eight years of a scandal free, if basically average, presidency....marred only by the catastrophic mistake of the President making fun, at a White House Correspondents Association dinner...of a victim of tanning bed overdoses and a bad orange comb over....who, possessed of absolutely no genetic ability to have a sense of humor or humility about himself, decided, that very night, to run, as retribution, for the office of President of the United States himself....the joke at the time, of course, being that his 'candidacy' was a joke....the joke, as it turned out, was that thinking it was a joke turned out to be absolutely nothing resembling funny....
...the first major attack on the continental United States by foreigners, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans, the total destruction of the World Trade Center, the major damaging of the Pentagon and the loss of forty authentically brave passengers who brought down an airliner that was determined later to be on a trajectory to destroy as much of Washington DC as possible....
...the first directed and undeniable attack on the nation's Capitol by a thousands strong 'lynch mob' of "Americans", incited to that attack by a, then, "President" of the United States.
And...come November 2024, the very real possibility that history will, in one of its more cruelest methods of pranking....repeat itself.
At least in terms of re-electing what was a once, and future, joke.
And August?
By August of this year, both of what passes these days for the 'Republican' Party and the Democratic Party will have held their conventions, nominated their nominees and set their nominees loose on an already exhausted nation of "we, the people".... the Democrats, as a matter of fact, meeting in August itself in Chicago.
Ending on August 22.
One week to the day before I turn seventy three.
Which is sixty nine days to the day before Election Day.
And the historic final episode of the historic first time drama of the possible election to the Presidency of the United States...of a very likely convicted felon who will have gotten his ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States as to whether or not he and, as a result, future Presidents of the United States are entitled, by law.....
...to be the only citizen in the entire population of the United States of America....
....exempt from the rule of law....and immune from prosecution, no matter the behavior, act and/or offense.
From amendments to espionage, elections to assassinations to resignations, from the chaos on Earth to the Sea of Tranquility, from the enemy forced collapse of major skyscrapers to the "making America great again" by assaulting the official headquarters of the "land of the free, home of the brave".....
I've seen a thing or two in seventy two years.
Seventy three years come August.
A month that has never really gotten its proper props.
A circumstance not likely to change any time soon.
Most surely not this year.
Given what's coming in November.
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