Nobody asked me, but . . . .

Short takes on RFK Jr., immigrant purge, new legal term, what to watch

The “Nobody asked me, but …” columns I wrote for years in The Baltimore Sun descended from the late New York columnist Jimmy Cannon. “Nobody Asked Me, But …” was his thing. From time to time, those columns appeared as a series of short takes, and Cannon was known for addressing a wide range of subjects. So, with that explanation and apologies . . .

Cannon

Nobody asked me, but immigrants — documented, undocumented, and even some by now unduly deported — deserve to be honored this Labor Day. So many of them engage in the hard-sweat work suggested in the word “labor” — building houses, trimming hedges, picking fruits and vegetables, cleaning homes and hotel rooms. In normal times, a president might declare official recognition of this hard-working, under-appreciated subculture. But these are not normal times; this is the time of Trump’s cruel immigrant purge.

Nobody asked me, but we should make sure there’s a special place in Hell, or at least in eternal infamy, for Republicans in the House and Senate who stood by silently while Trump’s masked goon squads kidnapped and roughed up immigrants, many of whom had done nothing wrong and some of whom had legal status as employed residents.

Nobody asked me, but, left unchecked as the nation’s health secretary to stop or further discourage childhood vaccinations, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is potentially the most dangerous man in America.

While it’s probably too late, the Kennedy family should conduct an actual physical intervention. On behalf of the nation, his relatives need to show up at RFK Jr.’s door with a straitjacket.

Or at least ask him to resign.

They could lay a quote from his famous father on him. Here’s something Bobby Kennedy told an interviewer just a short time before he was assassinated while running for president in 1968 : “I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this?”

But, of course, getting RFK Jr. to change his ways is probably impossible. He holds firm to his weird beliefs like someone diagnosed with delusional disorder and he throws around medical terminology — “These kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges” — to make his crackpot ideas sound authoritative. That’s not someone who needs family intervention; that’s someone who needs inpatient treatment.

Nobody asked me, but if he wants to do something for his country, Dr. Phil should offer to be health secretary. Trump would probably love to appoint another media celebrity to a cabinet position, and it would give him an opportunity to dump Junior.

Of course, that would be a relatively rational thing to do and, as I noted recently in this space, Trump suffers from a scorched-Earth psychosis. He appears to be determined to destroy everything the smart people created in this country.

Nobody asked me, but history will show that Trump’s most demented actions, his cruelest orders and his most government-damaging demands came from Stephen Miller and Russell Vought.

Trump is too lazy to think of all this on his own.

Nobody asked me, but, with Trump laying off federal workers in Maryland and his poll numbers falling, voters in the Free State are going to be in no mood to make Republican Larry Hogan their governor again, and I don’t care how popular he was last time. He was rejected as a Senate candidate last fall, with Democrat Angela Alsobrooks winning by nearly 12 percentage points. Hogan has distanced himself from Trump, but the Senate election results show that most Maryland voters suspected he’d have supported Trump’s agenda in Washington. And what’s the case for dumping Wes Moore after one term? So far, there isn’t one.

Nobody asked me, but the multiple failures of federal prosecutors to get felony indictments against protesters in Washington — the guy who threw the sub at an immigration agent, the woman who allegedly assaulted an FBI agent — creates a new term for the legal lexicon: Grand jury nullification.

Nobody asked me, but, absent extremely unusual circumstances, there’s almost no defense for falsely claiming on a mortgage application that your second home is a principal residence.

But if I’m an attorney representing the public officials reportedly accused of this, I would put subpoenas out for the mortgage applications of all members of the House and Senate and the Trump cabinet to see if any of them did the same thing.

Nobody asked me, but the Oxford English Dictionary needs to consider adding two words in the coming year: Reoysterization (the planting of oysters in estuaries and other waterways where they were historically found) and Imperviosity (the state of being impervious, or impenetrable, and a better word than imperviousness).

Amazing baseball fact: In 1966, his 12th and final year as a pitcher for the Dodgers, Sandy Koufax had a record of 27-9 with an ERA of 1.73 and 317 strikeouts.

Nobody asked me, but Olivia Colman shines brightly in just about all her performances on screen, including two series worth mentioning: “Landscapers” (HBO, Sky Atlantic) and “The Night Manager” (AMC, BBC One).

Movie getting lots of pre-release buzz: The Baltimorons, a holiday romcom directed by Jay Duplass. Opening in New York on September 5 and having its (soldout) Baltimore premiere on Sept. 10.

Reminder — or a notice if you’ve never heard this before — that the peppers-and-eggs sandwich is the official meal of Labor Day. You can read the reasons why and get the recipe here.

Taking a break: This newsletter will resume in a week or so. See you in September.