The late NFL head coach George Allen had a favorite saying: “The future is now.” Conversely, The Week's Linker believes the Republican party’s future “will be delayed so long as [its] candidates remain beholden to voters who view politics primarily as a megaphone for broadcasting an ignorant, garbled howl of anger, fear, alienation, and resentment.”

In a Friday piece, Linker remarked that conservative activists, who tend to view events “through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy,” have gradually dragged down the party as they’ve become a larger and larger share of it. In Linker’s words, “They’ve grown and spread like a fungus (thanks to the fertilization efforts of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes).” One recent consequence: the popularity among GOPers of the “vulgar blowhard” Donald Trump.

Since Democrats belong to the party of government, it stands to reason that their presidential candidates actually want to be president -- including Bernie Sanders, who’s a Democrat only for the sake of convenience. Republican candidates? Not necessarily. Some of them, according to writer Sean Illing, are “half-baked celebrities allowed to hijack the process to promote their private careers.” Case in point: Donald Trump.

“It says something significant about the Republican Party that there’s space for someone like Trump or Sarah Palin or even Herman Cain in it. These people aren’t credible candidates; they’re product-pushing brands,” wrote Illing. “Trump’s circus act isn’t possible in the Democratic Party…Only in the Republican Party do unserious candidates emerge as contenders…Only among conservative Republicans are hucksters like Trump embraced.”

The two most recent Republican presidential nominees weren’t particular favorites of the party’s core voters. This time, suggests Jamelle Bouie, if the GOP wants a candidate who excites its base, the choice is clear: Donald Trump, who boasts the “belligerence” and “bigotry” that “ugly and angry” right-wingers love.

Since Trump’s never held political office, observed Bouie in a Wednesday piece, he can say pretty much anything that’ll rev up righty activists, whereas even staunchly conservative officeholders “can appease the Republican base with harsh attacks on the other side, but they can’t endorse every crazy idea, lest they hurt their [legislative] goals and priorities.”

Conservatives have an ideological fever, and the only prescription is to wait until their crazy ideas vanish. That’s the word from Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman, who opined in a Wednesday post that many on the right have suffered from a sort of “heat-fever” when confronted with President Obama and his policies.

Longman explained that “a fever is something that comes over you suddenly, causing addled thinking, hallucinations and other delusions, but which eventually breaks and goes away as quickly as it arrived...[T]he Obama Era has been marked by an unusual number of these outbreaks of mass insanity,” such as rage against the Affordable Care Act.

Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. Last week’s Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage. California’s new mandatory-vaccination law. What all these have in common, according to Michael Specter, isn’t merely that they’re correct, but that they’re manifestations of “rational thought.”

Three of those events, of course, were highly unpopular on the right (the vaccination issue is less ideologically clearcut) so it’s fair to say that Specter also sees them as defeats for the conservative movement, though he opines that the SCOTUS is “governed largely by conservatives” and that the pope certainly has some right-wing tendencies (“in many areas,” Specter snipes, Francis “adheres to tenth-century notions of justice”).

It’s likely that most NewsBusters readers are familiar with the grimly humorous saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Last Friday, UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman opined in so many words that the Republican party’s beatings in presidential elections will continue until its mental health improves.

In a Friday Washington Monthly post, Kleiman mocked conservatives for their allegedly fanciful belief that their “frivolous” arguments in King v. Burwell would carry the day and predicted that Republicans probably have a few more years of delusion and defeat ahead of them: “It’s possible that a convincing [Hillary] Clinton win and a Democratic recapture of the Senate in 2016 will shock the GOP back to reality. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Feeding right-wing fury is a profitable venture financially, and it works well enough electorally in off-years to keep the hustle going. My guess is that it will take a Clinton re-election landslide in 2020 to do the job.”

There's a major opinion gap between white Catholics and Latino Catholics in the U.S. regarding climate change. A recent poll found that by margins of approximately 20 percent, Latino Catholics are likelier than white Catholics to believe that there is such a thing as global warming; that it’s “due to human activity”; and that it “constitutes a crisis or a major problem.” What’s causing this discrepancy? A false god, suggests writer Patricia Miller.

“White Catholics don’t accept the scientific consensus on climate change because it clashes with their other god: the free market,” declared Miller in a Thursday piece for Salon. “Over the last 15 years…much of institutional American Catholicism has become hopeless[ly] intertwined with a conservative, liberation [sic] ideology that has trickled down to Catholics in the pews.”

In the lead-up to the King v. Burwell decision, not a few liberals claimed that most Republicans secretly wanted the Supreme Court to uphold certain Obamacare subsidies because quashing them would have caused major political hassles for the GOP. The SCOTUS ruled Thursday morning, and before noon we had examples of the updated conventional wisdom: Republicans are happy with the decision, which will spare them harm in the 2016 elections.

One post in this vein came from Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the main writer for the TRMS blog. Benen asserted that chief justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, “did the GOP an enormous favor -- had the court created systemic chaos, and scrapped benefits for millions of red-state families, Republicans would have confronted an incredible mess they were woefully unprepared to clean up. Worse, there’s a big election coming up, and the GOP was poised to be on the hook for hurting a lot of people out of nothing but spite.”

Racial issues, not gun issues, understandably have been at the forefront of most media coverage of the Charleston massacre, but Adam Gopnik suggests that in any such mass shooting, the firearm is the salient factor.

“Mental health, the enduring structures of racism—these are issues that we have to deal with, too,” wrote Gopnik in a Tuesday column. “But they are not at the heart of the tragedy. Gun massacres happen for no reason at all, as well as for crazy reasons. Every country has people who come into the grip of delusions...Most countries keep lethal weapons out of their hands. After a mass killing, grief is supported by wisdom; laws change, and killings stop.”