So what do I like about the title? Well, used differently, it’s illuminating. It’s reminiscent of Hugh Hewitt’s brief clarity on the threat of Donald Trump to the Republican party. As he put it last June, “The plane is headed towards the mountain” and the GOP needed to do whatever it took to gain control and prevent the debacle of nominating Donald Trump. Inexplicably, Hugh quickly abandoned that argument and decided to strap himself in, perusing the SkyMall catalog for Trump ties as the plane careened toward the mountain peaks.

In my preferred metaphor, we are on a plane heading for a bad place, though not to our deaths. We are heading to a place from which it will require years of work just to get back to where we are now, never mind a preferred destination. I remember giving speeches during Obama’s first term, amidst the fights over the stimulus and Obamacare. The set title for my talks was “Cheer Up, for the Worst Is Yet to Come.” I was right of course. But I remember saying, often, that I may end up spending the rest of my professional life fighting just to undo the messes this president has created. That may well still be true. And if either of these two hot messes hit the fan in November — and one almost surely will — I’m going to be on my hands and knees with a bucket and sponge trying to get the stain out of the carpeting.

And that’s the thing. The plane is off course because the pilot is MIA, off guest-editing Wired magazine or some such, while the other two members of the flight crew are fighting over the throttle. One, Hillary Clinton, wants to take us to a bad place and she knows how to get there. The other, Donald Trump, wants to take us someplace that doesn’t even exist. The best argument for Donald Trump is that if the destination existed, it might be a great place to go. I hear the martinis in King’s Landing are fantastic. Meanwhile, the only argument for Clinton is that at least she knows how to fly.