The past few days have been, to me, the definition of how Democrats always, always, always fall for it.

For the past decade or so, Republicans have made a habit of getting the name of the Democratic Party wrong, just for yuks. Democrats then spend half their available airtime/screentime/op-ed space explaining what the name of their party is, and their available space for talking about actual policy issues is diminished. Trump spends a surprising proportion of the primary talking about the size of his penis. Democrats then go into a tizzy about who was talking about what idiotic things in the Republican Party debates, instead of, you know, meaningful issues. Now we’re talking about crowd sizes instead of the DOJ switching sides on the Voting Rights Act, or any other major issue of the day.

Yeah, I get it. Getting the name of a major political party wrong makes you look like an idiot. Talking about your penis size makes you look like an idiot. Having a loud and public on-camera argument with reality makes you look like an idiot.

But you know what else makes you look like an idiot? When you’ve got actual important things to talk about and you let your opposition sideline your entire message with this nonsense. Ultimately, it does not matter what the names of our political parties are, or how big our respective body parts are, or if we’re really bad at counting people. But if we can spend four years talking about stuff that doesn’t matter when so much critical stuff is happening all around us, we are really, really done for.