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.