As we approach yet another election, we find ourselves listening to a host of voices trying to get our attention.  We tune most of them out as noise.  Even though my wife and I are strong Trump-supporters (in most areas), we've stopped watching his rallies.  We've heard the message and don't need to hear it again.

There are a significant number of potential voters who are too busy to tune in or are baffled by the conflicting claims that saturate the news channels.  They're too tired or uninterested to read about "The Unchanging Principles of Conservatism Defined."  They want a quick answer without all the fluff.  Can we inject clarity into this babble?

In a sound-bite world, truth needs to be crystallized.  When Left and right both say they want to promote "the American Dream," it's obvious that they aren't talking about the same thing.  So let's condense it.

The American Dream is the idea that "You can bust your butt to make a better life, and not have it stolen by anyone, not even the government."

The historical truth of this is self-evident.  People braved treacherous ocean crossings in barely seaworthy ships so they could scratch out an existence in a new land threatened by multitudes of unknown dangers.  This continued throughout our western expansion.  Now that we have subdued the physical threats faced by our pioneers, our uninformed progeny regard simple differences of opinion as worthy of the same response as marauding Apaches.  They march for "free everything" in the name of "socialism," while completely misunderstanding the following:

The Socialist Dream is the idea that the government should steal the work of those who busted their butts to give it to those who won't get off their own.

These sound bites are short enough for anyone who works for a living to comprehend them, even in the middle of the noise of life.  But we must go a bit farther.  When the Left calls the president a "Nazi," we should remind them that "Nazi" is short for "National Socialist."  When leftists scream for socialism, they are the Nazis.  And yes, Hitler's economics were socialist, and American Democrats were cheerleaders for Hitler.  Even John F. Kennedy was a fan of Hitler prior to World War II.

We don't expect the mind-numbed robots of the Left to hear, much less process these thoughts.  What we are trying to do is to create clarity in the minds of those who are being battered by competing claims.  The Left uses words for impact, not information.  Thus, "Nazi," "racist," "authoritarian," and other slanderous epithets are merely evil-sounding noise intended to scare the hearer.

Careful, rational presentations, while accurate, are useless against the shouting.  All we can do is wait for the Left to take a breath and then hit hard with a truth so clear and so short that it is complete and in the hearer's mind before the Left can shout against it.

It has been said that when all you have is name-calling, you've lost the argument.  While that may be true, we aren't in a debate.  We are competing for a narrow bandwidth window.  Only a message narrowly tailored to that is useful.