Imagine an Abortion Pride Day parade in which women march while pushing empty strollers and baby carriages. That’s not far off from what Mother Jones pundit Drum recommended in a Wednesday post.

Drum suggested that women who’ve had an abortion and believe they made the right choice ought to say so publicly, and that they should view out gays and lesbians as role models in that regard: “As long as gays stayed largely closeted, it was easy for most people to think there weren't very many of them…[but] as more and more gays came out, that view was forced to fade away…The same is true of abortion…When it turns out your next-door neighbor had an abortion? Or the waitress at the diner you go to for lunch? Or your doctor? Then it gets a little harder to think of it as something unusual and sort of icky. It's just something people do.”

Almost a quarter-century ago, Seal sang, “We're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.” These days, suggests Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, it’s awfully hard to survive in the Republican presidential race if you’re only a little crazy, now that Donald Trump “has flooded the market with a new, purer brand of Crazy that has left the other candidates scrambling and basically unable to compete.”

“Trump is in many ways the logical end result of seven years -- really two-plus decades -- of Republican cultivation of anger and grievance as a method of conducting politics,” asserted Marshall in a Monday post, adding that Trump “has managed to boil modern Republicanism down to a hard precipitate form, shorn of the final vestiges of interest in actual governing.”

David Roberts has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.”

“One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a Thursday article, “was that reporters in the Beltway ‘Village’ failed to grasp modern conservatism and wrote about it in such a way as to sand down and mute its extremity…[T]here are still plenty of mainstream political reporters who cling to the both-sides illusion to this day…But as the far right sends the Republican Party through an ever-more-absurd series of showdowns and tantrums, the illusion is fading.”

Could Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid suffer collateral damage from the wreck of Bill Cosby’s reputation? Quite possibly, believes author, professor, and unreliable liberal (that’s a compliment) Paglia, who contends that “there is a big parallel” between Cosby’s scandalous sexual behavior and that of Bill Clinton.

In an interview with Salon, Paglia speculated that Hillary’s public reaction to her husband’s randy antics won’t sit well with the young female voters whom you’d expect to be ardent supporters of hers: “Hillary has a lot to answer for, because she took an antagonistic and demeaning position toward her husband’s accusers. So it’s hard for me to understand how the generation of Lena Dunham would or could tolerate the actual facts of Hillary’s history.”

One year ago, a British newspaper published a list of President Obama’s ten favorite television shows (the top three, in reverse order: Breaking Bad, The Wire, and M*A*S*H). Not on the list was The Daily Show, on which Obama guested yet again this past Tuesday, but Penn State's Sophia McClennen thinks that if Obama had been more of a TDS fan, he long ago would have realized how irrational his conservative opposition was.

In a Friday article for Salon, McClennen asserted that Stewart and Stephen Colbert “had insight into U.S. politics Obama never seemed to understand. ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ were one of the main sources of truth telling about U.S. politics and the nature of the Republican Party before and during the Obama presidency.” Those programs, wrote McClennen, illuminated “the twisted thinking, hubris, disdain for large segments of society, and closed-mindedness that forms the common, core mind-set of Fox viewers.”

There soon will be sixteen Republicans officially seeking their party’s 2016 presidential nomination, but Gabriel Sherman probably would replace “officially” with "nominally." In a Sunday post, Sherman suggested that many of those sixteen are CINOs (Candidates in Name Only) who really are running for the title of big-bucks “political celebrity.” He opined that “when it comes to presidential elections…the GOP is at risk of becoming less of a political party and more like a talent agency for the conservative media industry.”

As for why quite a few “(pseudo)candidate[s]” are out there trying to “promote their brand,” Sherman noted that “the rise of billionaire donors and super-PACs enable more fringe GOP candidates to fund their campaigns,” and that “conservatives’ palpable sense of cultural victimhood encourages them to embrace (and reward) their former candidates even if they lose badly.”

Historian Rick Perlstein, the author of three books (so far) on American movement conservatism from the mid-‘50s through the mid-‘70s, believes, in essence, that conservatives are tribalists whose central task is to promote hatred against other tribes. According to Perlstein, two recent news stories serve to illuminate that process, which, he suggests, involves an almost scientific-sounding conservation of the right wing’s bigoted energy.

“Conservatism is like bigotry whack-a-mole,” wrote Perlstein. “The quantity of hatred, best I can tell from 17 years of close study of 60 years of right-wing history, remains the same. Removing the flag of the Confederacy, [Donald Trump] raising the flag of immigrant hating: the former doesn’t spell some new Jerusalem of tolerance; the latter doesn’t mean that conservatism’s racism has finally been revealed for all to see. The push-me-pull-me of private sentiment and public profession will always remain in motion, and in tension.”

The New York Times reported last weekend that one line of attack American Crossroads and other Republican-leaning groups are likely to use against Hillary Clinton is that she’s far too wealthy to relate to average Americans. Regarding such criticism, Steve Benen says, in effect: Bring it on.

Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, argued in a Monday post that the rich-and-out-of-touch charge won’t stick to Hillary the way it did to Mitt Romney because “Romney was extremely wealthy while pushing a policy agenda that would benefit people like him,” whereas Hillary’s economic program would help those nowhere near as well-off as she is.

Since Scott Walker is both a “threat to reproductive rights” and a deceitful doofus, he would be an unusually dangerous Republican presidential nominee, argued lefty pundit Marcotte in a Monday blog post for Slate.

If the race pits Walker against Hillary Clinton, the Wisconsin governor “could give her a real run for her money,” wrote Marcotte, “because Walker does a much better job than most of the Republican field at lulling low-information voters into thinking he's a moderate…[If] female and young voters…don’t realize that Walker is a scary woman-basher, they might not mobilize in the numbers Clinton needs. That's something Walker will be counting on.”