Category: Rants

It's hard to overstate what a non-event last week's "capture" of U.S. Navy personnel who were detained in Iran for all of about 15 hours after straying into Iranian territorial waters. Information released by the Navy today underscores how routine the incident was, with the exception of the sailors being taken off the ships briefly for clumsy Iranian military propaganda purposes.

That timeline and the White House response are an example of how international relations are supposed to work in a world run by adults. Since provoking war with Iran while trying to get them to accede to the terms of an agreement to limit their nuclear program presumably is not on the agenda, we can be pretty confident that, conspiracy theories aside, the detour from international waters was either a pure accident or a simple case of young officers trying to shave some time and fuel off their route with a quick shortcut. As Ben Carson and the other GOP candidates were busy trying to turn this into Iranian Hostage Crisis 2016, the non-incident was over before they could even settle on alarmist rhetoric.

The psychology of elected officials and voices in the media that demand that the U.S. "look tough" and "stand up to" Iran, suggesting that somehow what happened is a source of enduring national shame, is both obvious and sad. Why were Iranians able to board the ships? Presumably because the Navy personnel judged correctly that their minor detour was not worth starting a bullet exchange over. Why didn't Obama stand up and start beating his chest and issuing ultimatums? Presumably because we made a mistake and that's OK. It happens. We made a very, very insignificant mistake and nobody got hurt and it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The best way to play this isn't to escalate it, but to give Iran a good, condescending, "A propaganda video? Come on dude, that's so North Korea."

There are a lot of people in this country who appear, at least in their political views, unable to admit a mistake without being struck dead by shame and humiliation. I feel really sorry for them and the people who have to interact with them. What an exhausting, pointless waste of energy it must require to keep up that facade, to choose to saber-rattle and fight over every little thing lest one Shows Weakness in Front of the Russians.
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It's nothing short of amazing how much the words "I'm sorry" can simplify life, even if, as is often the case in international affairs, you aren't entirely sincere. There's nothing wrong with that.
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Especially when dealing with an incident so insignificant that no amount of histrionics can make anyone care about it let alone look at it as a great national crisis.

19th Century newspaper baron Horace Greeley is best known for the quote borrowed for the title of this post. As the founder and editor of the New York Tribune (which later merged with the Herald before shutting down in 1966) he was a champion of the Whig, then Republican, antislavery movement. What not as many people remember is that he donated his body to be defeated by Ulysses S. Grant in the 1872 presidential election. Many modern sources list him as a Democrat, but in truth the Democratic Party was so weak during Reconstruction that they endorsed Greeley rather than nominate their own candidate. The general election was therefore a competition between two factions within the GOP, one of which had nominal Democratic support.

That's not the interesting part, though. Greeley is the only major party presidential candidate to drop dead before Electoral votes were cast.

I won't rehash the entire Electoral College system here (here is a primer if you're lost) but its most useful contribution to modern American politics seems to be the introduction of a number of great hypotheticals. With the ages of a number of candidates in this election more than a handful of people have brought up scenarios in which a nominee dies. What happens? It depends a great deal on when they die.

For the sake of argument let's say Clinton and Warren (VP) win the Democratic nomination. Just to facilitate this example. Anything that happens before the Democratic convention would be an easy solution for either party, by the way.
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Running in the primaries is not strictly necessary to win the nomination if a candidate – Clinton in this example – were to win delegates in the primaries but die before the delegates cast their votes at the convention. Those delegates would become uncommitted, which is the same thing that happens to delegates won in a primary when a candidate drops out. And really, dying before the convention is nothing more than dropping out of the race.
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Really emphatically.

After the convention but before the election, if either nominee died they would be replaced according to the rules established by the parties. It wouldn't necessarily be the most formal process; in 1972 when Thomas Eagleton was removed from the Democratic ticket, the nominee (George McGovern) was basically told to pick someone else by the Democratic National Committee.
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There could be a second, smaller convention in which people in leadership positions met to choose someone in the old (pre-1968) convention style. If the VP nominee died, a new person would be chosen. If the presidential nominee died, either the VP nominee could be elevated to the position or a different person could be chosen. It would be kind of a mess.

After the election but before Electoral votes are cast – the Greeley predicament – is a bit more of a problem.
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Despite the fact that some states have "pledge laws" for Electors that are very likely unenforceable, Electors can vote for whomever they want. In 1872 nobody much cared because Greeley lost the election soundly, but the Electors split between voting for the deceased candidate and voting for an assortment of other politicians. Thanks to the 12th Amendment Electors cast two votes, one for president and one for VP. So, if the Clinton-Warren ticket won and then Clinton died, a plausible solution would be the Electors casting their votes for Warren as president and…it gets interesting. Could they collaborate and choose someone else to serve as VP? If you read Article II of the Constitution there would be nothing to stop them. They could also cast blank ballots for VP and then allow Congress to appoint someone to fill the position, as happened when Gerald Ford was chosen as VP upon the resignation of Spiro Agnew.

The really tricky part is the gap between the casting of Electoral votes and inauguration. It's a period of about 4 weeks, from late December to January 20. Having already received votes from the Electors, neither candidate could be replaced by the Democratic Party at this point. Alternative interpretations of the Constitution would abound, but the clear course of action would be the elevation of the VP-Elect to the position of President-Elect. Technically, I think the process would be the swearing-in of the VP-Elect and then, with the Presidency vacant upon the end of Obama's term, immediately elevated to the presidency. Then Congress would be required to fill the VP spot.

There's a contingency in place for just about any scenario. Nonetheless it should be obvious that losing a candidate at some point during the election – or especially after the election – would be a mess. The territory might not be entirely uncharted but it would be, with respect to Horace G., effectively unprecedented.

The Supreme Court is almost certainly about to gut public employee unions, including teachers' unions. Briefly, state laws currently can compel some people to pay union dues if they benefit from the collective bargaining done by the union on behalf of all employees.
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Otherwise any rational person would realize that the dominant strategy is that of all Free Riders: contribute nothing, hope the contributors succeed, and then enjoy the benefits. Since a teachers' union bargains on behalf of all teachers and not just union members, the seemingly sound logic goes, all should contribute.

The complicating factor is that unions, like corporations, non-profit groups, and many other entities, donate money in elections and are active in other aspects of the political process. It was only a matter of time until someone interested in becoming a right-wing martyr filed the right lawsuit. He/she can go on tour with Kim Davis. Think of the ticket sales.

Literally the first thing I cover when teaching Intro to American Government is the concept of a collective action problem. It's the backbone of the course, and it comes up repeatedly. The textbook explanation is that rational individuals have the incentive to free ride. What I don't cover but believe to be an important part of the resistance to collective action is that people (read: conservatives) wildly overestimate what they are capable of achieving on their own. Why should we have single-payer healthcare, I will be able to pay for my own healthcare. Why donate to an environmental group, if the water is gross I'll just move.
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And who needs a teachers' union, I'm awesome and I'll either negotiate a sweet deal all by myself or I'll just get a higher paying job at another school. Believe me, there is not a single social, economic, or political problem you can present to 19 year olds as a hypothetical that they are not 100% confident that they will solve on their own initiative, most likely incorporating the use of Bootstraps. It's understandable at that age. Unfortunately a lot of people never seem to grow out of it.

In an entirely different course we read Anthem, selected because it is the shortest and thus least painful Ayn Rand piece and because it is one of the finest works of comedy ever penned. How can you do anything but adore a story that ends with a man drafting an ode to individualism in a house someone else built and that he broke into. Anyway, the real money scene is where the protagonist heads out into the forest and, in the space of a few hours before dinnertime, he makes a bow and arrows and shoots plenty of birds out of the sky to feed himself. He also gets a few by throwing rocks at them. This is a minor detail in the story but, in my view, is a great litmus test of a fundamental personality characteristic. The kind of person who thinks, "Yeah that seems plausible" believes that some people, namely themselves, are simply Great and therefore can solve any and every problem on their own through the force of their own Greatness. The other kind of person looks at a man running off into the woods with no supplies, food, clothing, or tools of any kind and thinks, "Well he's gonna be dead in about a week."

When someone shrinks from collective action it might be based on a rational belief that the group will succeed regardless and the benefits will be available for everyone to enjoy. It also might be the result of decades of bombardment with Rugged Individualist homilies and the belief that there simply is no problem that one cannot solve with their own (no doubt inestimable) talents.
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The latter goes one of two ways. For some people, a life of social privilege and unearned wealth reinforce the belief that one is Great and needs no one else. For the rest life has some real big surprises in store.

I had the good fortune to attend a conference in San Juan for half of last week; "fortunate" in the sense that it was 86 degrees when I got on the plane Sunday morning and 7 – 7 goddamn degrees – when I got off in Chicago.
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Beyond that I got to visit America's politically ambiguous colonial non-state possession for the first time. Although I didn't see the entire island or get to stay for very long, the short visit did motivate me to do something Americans tend never to do: pay a little bit of attention to Puerto Rico.

About the extent of my knowledge of Puerto Rican politics and internal affairs, as is the case with most Americans, is that they are all screwed up. The island's government is deeply in debt, its population is aging and unproductive because the young people leave to the mainland US for higher wages, and Congress has no intention of altering the relationship between PR and the rest of the country because of course every aspect of that relationship has been defined in a way that benefits us. That's how colonialism works.

Puerto Ricans have some interest in statehood, which is a non-starter with a Republican Congress. Their objection, as with D.C. statehood, is the inevitable addition of two more Democrats to the Senate should PR become a state. Ironically, in the 1990s it was the Republicans who were all for PR statehood. They pretended that it was some sort of principled stand but most people saw it as a transparent effort to curry favor with Hispanics. Believe it or not, it was even more cynical than that; they wanted to make PR a state so that the government would no longer be obligated to pay the island for the use of various military facilities on it like the test bombing range on Vieques. It was a classy move, although obviously it went nowhere.

That was about all I knew. Well, there was one more thing: over the past year I kept reading that there was a lot of controversy on the island over the issue of cabotage.

This information created two problems for me. First, every time I see it I replace "Sabotage" with cabotage and get the song stuck in my head. Second, I have no goddamn idea what cabotage is.

It seemed worth a half hour on the way to the airport to read a little.

Cabotage is, "the transport of goods or passengers between two places in the same country by a transport operator from another country." It is forbidden in the United States by the Jones Act, which is nearing its 100th birthday. For example, that a Panamanian ship cannot stop in New Orleans and then stop in San Juan. Only an American owned, registered, and crewed ship can transport things from cities like Houston or New Orleans to the island. This is important because PR has to import nearly everything (for reasons that are controversial, but for which the island itself deserves at least some blame). In short, the highly consolidated US shipping industry has Puerto Rico over a barrel.
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As you might expect they take every opportunity to ream them.

The real tragedy is that mismanagement – both self-mismanagement and ineffective governance by colonial powers like Spain and the U.S. – has created a dependence on imports that isn't strictly necessary. The island is well suited to agriculture but grows almost none of its own food.

It has some of the best conditions for a renewable commercial timber industry but instead imports wood from the U.S. and Canada. Compared to much of the Caribbean, it is underdeveloped for tourism and undercut on price by similar destinations in the region. It's a sad state of affairs and one that is not rare around the world: a place with a lot of potential that it will never realize for political reasons.

It will be an ancillary issue at best but during this election it wouldn't be surprising to see the candidates pressed on bailing out the Puerto Rican government as it comes closer to defaulting on its $70 billion in debt. I'm no economist but at a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 68%, promising alternatives to a Congressional bailout are neither numerous nor apparent.

Nothing makes clearer the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the NRA and its acolytes quite like the reaction earlier this week to Obama's beyond-milquetoast executive order about background checks at gun shows and for internet gun sales. As far as "gun control" goes, that is just about the least you could possibly do and still qualify. That makes it about one tenth of one percent more difficult to buy a gun. I am going to be accused of hyperbole here so click the link if you don't believe me: everybody supports this. 85% of Republicans support it. In public opinion terms, when one in ten people will support or oppose literally anything you can put on a survey because of measurement error, not reading the question, or just trying to be cute/funny, 89% of Americans supporting something is the functional if not statistical equivalent of "everybody." The reason it enjoys universal appeal is that it is basic common sense, it is merely an extension of an existing law, and it is such a diminutive baby step that even the most lunatic gun nuts would have a hard time calling it "gun control" with a straight face.

If anything, the fact that this is the extent of the regulation our political process can successfully enact against the firearm industry shows how completely pro-2nd Amendment forces have won this debate. This guy had to fight and eventually circumvent Congress to do something that literally no person, gun owners included, in their right mind opposes or considers onerous. It's like he passed an executive order saying people have to be 21 to buy alcohol in a bar as well as in stores.
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This is the biggest non-event in the history of government regulation.

So leave it to Ted Cruz, an hour after the announcement, to claim that Obama is in tactical gear and arriving at your home shortly to take your guns. The same Obama who has been in the process of coming to take your guns – It's gonna happen any second now, be prepared! Better stock up! – for seven full years now. Because he issued an order that an existing law governing in-store gun sales should also apply to internet sales.

The reality, as we've said so many times that it makes me feel weary even to think about typing it out again, is that the NRA is the marketing arm of the gun industry, not a legitimate "interest group." Their job is to drum up fear so that people will run out and buy more guns.
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They represent gun manufacturers, not gun owners. That they represent the latter is an illusion.

The only rhetorical tool they have in light of the overwhelming meagerness of the amount of regulating the government does to firearms – in reality, not in the fever dreams of the Bundy Militia – is the constant recourse to the slippery slope. Oh sure, this might not be much but it's the first step in a chain of events that ends with Bill Clinton and the ACLU and Liberal Professors and Feminists and Welfare Queens kicking down your door and pulling your guns out of your hands. These weak, nearly futile efforts at regulating gun sales are always, in right wing rhetoric, the tip of an iceberg nobody can see and that we never seem to hit.

Actually, this isn't their only rhetorical tactic. There's also lying. They use that one a lot.

Tired of Best Movies of the Year lists? Well this should be a refreshing change of pace. Let's take a look at the year in unarmed black people, mostly but not exclusively males, killed by police in 2015. It's worth a review because, as you know by now, part of the process of normalizing these incidents is that you can't focus on any one because they happen so regularly that the media and public never follow any single case to its conclusion, with rare exceptions. I'll cheat just a little by starting at the end of 2014 since 12 year old Tamir Rice was shot in Cleveland by an officer who, it was just announced, will not be punished. This is just a sample of officer-involved killings in 2015, and I've sampled only the most egregiously sketchy cases here. If you want to sort through all 1,190 (so far) from 2015, knock yourself out. Otherwise take a look at this timeline and be honest with yourself about how many of these cases you remember hearing about when the link jogs your memory but otherwise had completely forgotten.

Nov. 22, 2014
Tamir Rice, 12, Cleveland OH
(Officers exonerated)

Dec. 2
Rumain Brisbon, 34, Phoenix AZ
(Officers exonerated)

Dec. 30
Jerame Reid, 36, Bridgeton, NJ
(Routine traffic stop, on video)

Jan. 8, 2015
Artago Damon Howard, 36, Union County, AR
(Weapon discharged "accidentally")

Feb. 4
Jeremy Lett, 28, Tallahassee, FL
(Unarmed, no criminal record, "fit description" of burglary suspect)

Feb. 15
Lavall Hall, 25, Miami Gardens, FL
(Mentally ill, wielding a broomstick)

Feb. 28
Thomas Allen, 34, Wellston, MO
(Cop jumps in moving car to shoot fleeing suspect, "feared for his life" despite fleeing)

March 1
Charly Leundeu Keunang, 43, Los Angeles, CA
(Seven cops against one unarmed homeless man)

March 6
Naeschylus Vinzant, 37, Aurora, CO
(Unarmed, skipped parole)

March 6
Tony Robinson, 19, Madison, WI
(Officer emptied weapon blindly while retreating, unarmed)

March 8
Anthony Hill, 27, DeKalb County, GA
(Mentally ill Air Force veteran, naked when shot)

March 12
Bobby Gross, 35, Washington, DC
(Mentally ill, naked, wielding tree branch, was on DC Metro tracks when shot)

March 19
Brandon Jones, 18, Cleveland, OH

April 2
Eric Harris, 44, Tulsa, OK (Shot "accidentally" by a 73 year old "reserve deputy" playing cop)

April 4
Walter Scott, 50, North Charleston, SC (Officer indicted for murder, since it was on video and he attempted to plant a weapon)

April 15
Frank Shephard, 41, Houston, TX
(Killed after chase)

April 22
William Chapman, 18, Portsmouth, VA
(Officer fired)

April 25
David Felix, 24, NYC
(Mentally ill)

May 5
Brendon Glenn, 29, Venice, CA
(Shooting on video ruled "justified")

June 15
Kris Jackson, 22, South Lake Tahoe, CA
(Officer claimed "perceived a threat", no weapon found)

June 25
Spencer McCain, 41, Owings Mills, MD
(Officer claimed he had a weapon; unarmed)

July 12
Salvado Ellswood, 36, Plantation, FL
(Homeless man slapped officer, who shot him multiple times)

July 13
Sandra Bland, 28, Hempstead, TX

July 17
Albert Joseph Davis, 23, Orlando, FL
(Shot in back while fleeing)

July 17
Darrius Stewart, 19, Memphis, TN
(Officer mistaked him for a suspect)

July 19
Samuel Dubose, 43, Cincinnati, OH
(Officer fired, charges possible)

Aug. 7
Christian Taylor, 19, Arlington, TX
(Officer fired, "regrets" shooting)

Aug. 21
Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, St. Louis, MO (Police claimed he was aiming a gun at them; autopsy revealed he was shot in the back)

Sept. 23
Jeremy McDole, 28, Wilmington, DE (Paraplegic shot after allegedly brandishing gun from his wheelchair)

Oct. 18
Corey Jones, 31, Palm Beach Gardens, FL (Shot by plainclothes cop while waiting by his disabled vehicle on highway)

Nov. 15
Jamar Clark, 24, Minneapolis, MN (Shot while handcuffed, protesters later shot at by white supremacists)

Dec. 26
Quintonio Greer, 19, and Bettie Jones, 55, Chicago, IL (Greer "acted erratically" and Jones, an uninvolved neighbor, was shot "accidentally" according to the CPD)

And remember, this is just a slice of the nearly 1200 people killed by police in the U.S. this year.

Every argument about the presidential election on the internet follows one of two courses. The first is the bullet train to Fantasy Land, with references to bizarre conspiracy theories, inaccurate reconstructions of history, and predictions of things that will never, ever happen. The second is the Let's Be Realistic track, wherein people defend positions that cannot be defended on their merits by appealing to being "practical" or "pragmatic."

Whenever a person describes him- or herself as a realist, they are doing something they know to be wrong and of which they are ashamed. That's a free life lesson.

You'll notice this regularly in conversations about the Democratic nomination this year, and to a lesser extent back in 2008 when Obama started out as a nobody (albeit one with considerably more obvious "electability" than 75 year old Bernie Sanders).
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Every argument in favor of Hillary Clinton, once stripped of the fallacy that she is distinguishable on most major economic issues from Mitt Romney and that her new-found social liberalism was not determined by focus group three or four years beyond the point at which it was deemed electorally "safe" to take those positions, boils down to "Well, you have to vote for her." If you don't, you're electing President Trump! Remember Nader? Remember Hitler? Why do you want to elect Hitler?

The strange thing is that I don't disagree with this logic. I, and millions of others, will vote for Hillary Clinton simply because the alternative is even worse. This speaks directly to the problem at the core of American politics, though. It is very difficult to get anybody interested in, let alone excited about, a process in which we are constantly reminding them that they have to participate to pick between two things they don't like and choose the one that they dislike less. Does the Clinton campaign really hope to fire up the voting base with semi-authoritarian appeals that everyone to the left of Glenn Beck is essentially obligated to vote for her?
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Regardless of how "practical" or pragmatic that may be, does it sound like a winning message to you?

What are the reasons to vote for Hillary Clinton? There appears to be one: she can most likely beat any of the shaved apes the GOP is considering as a nominee right now. That's it. Vote for her not because she is good or honest or trustworthy or makes us believe something better about ourselves and our nation, but because she has statistically higher odds of winning the November election than the Democratic alternatives.

I'm not saying that's incorrect. I'm saying it's pathetic, and it goes a long way toward explaining why the campaigns across the political spectrum have to struggle mightily to get half of eligible adults to show up to vote in our most publicized and high-profile election every four years.
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Imagine you were told that you couldn't cheer for your favorite football team, but could only root for the Chicago Bears to lose every week and support whoever they happened to be playing at the moment. How motivated would you be to devote your time and money to attending games? That would start to feel pointless and boring pretty quickly, and more than a little soul-crushing.

I don't like posting about Work. Sure, I love telling the occasional classroom anecdote, carefully stripped of any potentially revealing or identifying characteristics but with its core intact, or talking about academia as a field but the "My boss is a pain in the ass" stuff has never been my style and for obvious reasons isn't a good idea for me or anyone else. Fortunately my father and I have jobs that are similar in one crucial respect even though they are quite different, so let's talk in completely anonymous terms about his field instead.

My dad is a local judge. One of the best, if not THE best, parts of being a judge is that the position is essentially held for life as long as you continue to show up to work and do at least the bare minimum amount of work required to claim that you are doing your job. True, state and county judges do not properly hold lifetime appointments in the same way that a Federal judge does in the United States, but let's just say the obstacles to keeping the job once you have it are not formidable in most states.
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In that sense, judges are very much like professors with tenure. You can do a really half-assed job if you so choose, but short of not showing up to do the job or violating one's contract (punching a student, disappearing for a month, not grading student work, etc) they can't fire you.

Similarly, I imagine that judges vary in their activity levels from the bulk of them trying earnestly to do their job well (either to advance professionally or just because of their personality) and some doing as little as possible. That is any and every workplace. One of the leading frustrations people have regardless of profession is the sense, or reality, that not everyone is doing their fair share. Such is life.

What amazes me when my dad tells stories about issues or conflicts at work (not about actual courtroom things, but interactions among coworkers) is how similar the stories sound to ones I hear from academic friends. Of course part of the explanation is that every workplace is the same on some level; people gripe, have petty feuds, gossip, and so on. From the White House to White Castle, that is just the nature of the proverbial office water cooler. But in my line of work and Elder Ed's, the fact that coworkers engage in pitched battles with one another makes even less sense than it usually does. Nobody can get fired. Why in the name of god do people feel the need to quarrel and cause problems when it is explicit that all anyone – everyone – has to do is to continue showing up and if that high standard is met, everyone gets a paycheck pretty much indefinitely?

The other amazing thing is that both of these professions fall under the "Challenging, not hard" category. In one sense we both have what amounts to the easiest job in the world; we sit on our asses all day and spend a varying amount of time talking.
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We have to write things. Mentally the jobs can be difficult and stressful, but as I like to say, being a professor ain't exactly coal mining. Intellectually it is trying. Physically it's the closest you can get to being paid to lie on a couch.

Despite every word of what I just said being true, people in jobs like this still feel the need – for reasons I have the most difficult time fathoming – to fuck with their coworkers. My best guess is that it boils down to insecure people with fragile egos that require constant stroking and the perception of "insults" where a normal person would either not see one or see it and think, "Yeah but who gives a shit?" If one judge tells another "You are a moron and you don't know anything about the law," why would anyone bother responding with anything beyond "Oh, OK."? And why would anyone care enough to say that to a colleague in the first place? We can't get fired. We have life by the balls. Why, under such conditions, would anyone care about their colleagues' opinions or feel compelled to offer their own unsolicited?

If I think you suck at your job it profits me nothing to say so. You will continue to get a paycheck and so will I. It does not matter what you think of me nor I of you. So really, what's the point?

People just need to make drama and conflict, perhaps. Even when none exists and nothing can be gained by creating it. Maybe it's the same impulse that led cavemen to paint on rocks, except in this example we replace the urge for creative expression with the urge to be a dick and start fights every time our fee-fees get hurt or we're bored.

Everyone keeps asking when Donald Trump is going to go away. Even The Onion has noticed his staying power, noting the number of times the candidate has said or done something that led observers to conclude, "That was the final straw; he's done now." It turns out though that a campaign can survive a lot when its core supporters are racists, people who aren't very smart, and racists who are not very smart. As superlative nonfiction author Mark Bowden, who covered Trump nearly 20 years ago for a magazine piece, says:

Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America?

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Round up the families of suspected terrorists?
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Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse?

When your bread and butter is people who don't like to think, it's pretty difficult to drive them away by saying poorly thought out, offensive, and stupid things. And here he is, leaving every major poll about a month out from the first real live nominating events.

So when IS he going to go away?

Well. One school of thought has been that his leading position will disappear when actual votes are cast. In other words, people who say right now that they like him or choose him on polls simply because of his name recognition will get serious and choose a "real" candidate when it's time to vote. Another is that eventually he will say something so offensive that his supporters will abandon him for a candidate with a better chance of winning.
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I think both of these scenarios are improbable.

The most obvious problem, and also the best explanation for why Trump has yet to disappear, is that knocking someone out of first place requires someone else to step into that position. All of the other candidates in this field are so bad, so inept, and so ruthlessly unlikable that none of them can build enough momentum and support to threaten Trump except Carson, whose followers are of the same "What's the point of thinking?" variety. Were there a single good candidate in the field, you wouldn't have 17 candidates in the first place. There's no Mitt Romney this time around, no candidate who is safe, relatively sane, superficially affable, and ready to be handed the keys when it becomes apparent that everyone else in the field is just too insane.

My best guess is that Trump is going to go away once the primaries heat up, but not for the reasons so many people believe right now. This is a man of unprecedented arrogance who has never paid attention to a detail in his life; something tells me that he and his campaign are not going to shine when the time comes for old fashioned, ground level campaigning to begin. I'm guessing that Trump's ground game strategy is something along the lines of "I'm awesome, of course people are gonna come vote for me." The knowledge, ability, and willingness of a campaign led by an arrogant sociopath and made up of complete morons to campaign effectively in anything but the current "talk into the camera" part of the campaign must be lacking. Who is making up the precinct lists in Iowa? Who's in charge of the ground game in New Hampshire? What's the broader strategy for the first wave of primary states after Feb. 1? Has anyone involved in the Trump campaign at any level though of any of this? Certainly he can afford to pay campaign professionals; has he acquired the services of any competent, experienced ones? What are his volunteers doing aside from showing up at the occasional publicity stunt waving signs?

In short, it remains to be seen if Trump can campaign seriously because this is a man who has never taken anything seriously. He is so in love with his self-styled genius that it probably hasn't occurred to him that he does not know how to run a campaign at the nuts-and-bolts level. If his strengths are limited, as they appear to be, to drawing attention to himself in the national media, then the wheels will indeed come off this clown car when the actual ballots begin to be cast.

If not, and he proves smart enough to hire people who know what they're doing to run his campaign, then the historic awfulness of this Republican field could enable him to stick around for quite some time and even, if there is a prankster God who loves us, win the nomination. But that's quite an "if". My gut reaction is that neither he nor anyone like-minded has the attention span and intellect necessary to do the long, tedious work of actual campaigning.