There's a photo pinging around the blogosphere of a pallet of bricks, supposedly placed near Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities for use by "Democratic militants" during the recent unrest in Los Angeles. The accompanying post says that the bricks were paid for by organizations linked to Democratic financier George Soros, a frequent whipping boy of the American right.

"It's a Civil War!!" the post exclaims.

Actually, it's a hoax. The bricks photo comes from the website of a building supply company in Malaysia. And there is no war — civil or otherwise — in Los Angeles, where President Trump has sent 5,000 National Guard troops and Marines to quell an imaginary scourge of violence.

But the protests aren't entirely peaceful, either. Across the country, we've seen incidents of looting, vandalism and assault. And unless Democrats admit and condemn the violence — forcefully and unequivocally — the voters will come down on us like a ton of bricks.

That's been the historic pattern: the party of "law and order" wins, and the party of crime and chaos goes down to defeat. Too often, my own team has found itself on the losing side.

In 1968, when riots engulfed American cities, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon flooded the airwaves with advertisements showing street crime, switchblades and hypodermic needles. The message was clear: If you want to clamp down on crime, vote Republican.

Nixon went on to victory, and law and order has remained a staple of GOP appeals ever since. In 1988, George H. W. Bush infamously used a photo of Willie Horton........

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