Fish and company both tend to reek when too much time passes, said Benjamin Franklin, and so too do candidates, once their rationale and their welcome is gone. Time ran out years ago for Rick Santorum and ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, dismissed fourteen and six years ago by their state and their party. They rose from the dead at nobody’s urging, and injected themselves into the 2012 cycle, at nobody’s wish but their own.

Rejected now for the second time running, they refuse to retire, determined, with no hope of winning, to inflict the maximum damage on the people and party who spoiled the comebacks that never developed, unable to realize that their multiple failures are nobody’s fault but their own.