There Is A Solution

    Every day hundreds of thousands of decent police officers report for work.  Every day their lives, reputations and characters are challenged by a few bad actors.  They are as embarrassed by this as every citizen who pays their wages.  The mistake they make that embarrasses their safety is failing to police their colleagues.  They are intimidated by personal association and shared experience.  Perhaps even shared fear.  That has to stop.
    Here is the solution.  Every damage award should come from police retirement funds, reducing payouts of retirement benefits in the future and in the present.  That means every time officers let bad apples bring liabilities to their communities their retirement and those already receiving benefits should see those benefits reduced until the penalty is paid.  The police would immediately begin policing themselves.
   If you have concerns about that explain that to a nine-year-old tackled to the ground and cuffed or a fifteen-year-old having his head smashed into the pavement or maybe you want to explain it to someone shot 21 times for having a cell phone, maybe a fourteen-year-old shot in the back on Christmas morning.
    Maybe you want to explain it to the children of an officer shot out of hand because someone is frightened and radicalized by the misbehavior of other, unchecked officers.
    This is the real world. Malefactors should be checked.  Blue, black or purple let's make it actually matter in that real world.

The Deep End

    I'm watching my friends in the Democratic Party wadding in for the 2020 Presidential race and they are all wrong.  It's the wrong way to go about it and it doesn't address the most serious issue we face.  They need to wade into the deep end. The key is national security and foreign affairs.  That sounds odd for a Democrat. Our concerns are almost always domestic but we and the other western democracies are under serious attack and we have to respond.  In case you have missed it, historically, when we're faced with a legitimate threat, liberal democrats respond quite well albeit a little overwhelmingly violent.  You can debate whether the Japanese should have been A-bombed all you want but the fact is we did build the thing and we did use it.  Now we have about 12 thousand of them just waiting to go anywhere in the world we choose.  That's violence.
    Our republican friends have never won a real war and don't seem to have the first clue how to wage one.  Don't bother telling me about the American Civil War or the Spanish American War. Try to stay in the last 100 years.
    The current administration is unconcerned with the ongoing extensive attack on our society and is unwilling to do the simplest things to oppose it.  Any serious candidate for President should hammer that fact home at every opportunity.  It certainly should be emphasized the current people refuse to oppose attacks on our society.  It should be pointed out that is evidence of disloyalty and driven home relentlessly. Supporters of the current administration should unfailingly be belittled as disloyal by choice or by ignorance but belittled nonetheless.
    We are under attack by the Russians.  We know they are ramping up another disinformation campaign to confuse and confound our national debate and elections. We know this administration is disinterested in responding in any realistic way. Those facts are matters of public record.  More importantly, we know that the Trump people jumped at every chance they were offered to coordinate with and cooperate with those foreign attacks.  There is no doubt about that.  It is firmly on the public record.  The juvenile attempts to explain away these myriad contacts have only confirmed they did happen and seem to continue to happen. The willing acceptance of foreign cash into our political system should be portrayed as the crime it is.
    This might sound wrong or contradictory on it's face but the second prong of the Democratic Party's approach to 2020 should be to totally ignore Trump.  The eventual candidate should never acknowledge Trump's existence while his or her's surrogates should hammer his disloyalty and ineptitude.  The hallmark of that effort should be a refusal to debate on the grounds the republicans have failed to advance a legitimate candidate.  It was Clinton's response to Trump as though he wasn't inept and totally unfit that gave him legitimacy. We can all see that was a mistake.
    Any question about Trump should be met by the candidate with an articulation of some policy addressing the future.  It should always be left to surrogates to hammer Trump for disloyalty, first and ineptitude second. Always those two themes.
    It's simple: Hammer disloyalty and ineptitude and never acknowledge anything that would lend legitimacy to a Trump candidacy.  Those things have the virtue of being true and important.

We're Falling Short

    When I went to college one of the first survey courses I took was Philosophy 101.  In that course, they discussed the actual definition of the word, 'rhetoric" and how rhetoric is employed to advance public discourse and problem-solving.  It's an area of thought that goes back, at least, to the ancient Greeks.  I realized then and I still believe, not understanding rhetoric and linguistic forensics was a major hole in my education.  We should learn these things right along with learning our ABCs.  This knowledge is critical for any citizen of any country and is essential to rational thought.
    There is a good reason why public schools don't teach recent history.  Public events are vociferously debated for decades after the fact, as they should be.  It's almost impossible to relate recent historical events without advancing one side or the other in that debate. That's what family discussion and Sunday School are for.
    However, teaching the nuts and bolts of discourse isn't partisan.  It's becoming more and more obvious it's essential.  We are confronted with people who speak in an endless stream of fallacies. Some do so to deliberately mislead.  Others do so because they actually think in an endless stream of fallacy.  For some, it's a failure of morality.  For others, it's a failure of education.
    It's hard to sell bullshit as a bouquet of roses to someone who has been educated to know what bullshit smells like. These things should be part of all, elementary education. The thing to remember is; they are an important part of any law school education.  If someone trained as an attorney mouths a fallacy you know he's being deliberately dishonest.  Most politicians are attorneys.
    There are several listings of these illogical tactics, some less obscure than others. I think they should be published every day, in a box, on every editorial page.  Doing so would reduce a lot of opinion columns to farce.
    By far the most common is 'setting up a strawman'.  That's where you mischaracterize what's been said or done and then criticize your own mischaracterization.  The second most common is probably 'poisoning the well'. Familiarly illustrated by, " When did you stop beating your wife."  I don't think that needs more explanation.
    I judge politicians by how often they employ fallacies for the simple reason it means they are either poor thinkers or dishonest.  I do remember the only time I saw Jimmy Carter employ a rhetorical fallacy. He couldn't do it without smiling because he knew what he was doing.  LOL. To my mind that excused it.  The educated people who employ fallacies consciously to deceive will never be excused.
    The point is: Educate yourself.  If you know these things the fallacies clang a warning like a broken bell.