Remember the future?

While others are retreating to cozy corners to masturbate psychologically and rhetorically, conservatives might be interested in at least two things that will decide how their lives will be shaped if they defer on making those decisions themselves instead.

Near term, King v. Burwell goes to oral argument before SCOTUS March 4 - 48 hours from now. If King wins, Obamacare immediately becomes a failed state, like Libya and Somalia. That structural vacuum will demand filling, and the first and loudest call will be for Republicans to immediately replace what was lost - exactly as it was before.

Doing nothing is not an adult option. However, there are contingency plans in the wings. Legislation to enact the best consensus option had better be ready to drop in June or whenever SCOTUS finally rules, or Republicans can probably expect a growing public PR beating to begin on both legislative and presidential fronts heading toward November, 2016.

- - - - -

If Republicans don't want to look up unexpectedly one day to find this smiling face lecturing them from behind the presidential seal, it's long past time to get vaccinated. Why Ben Carson has become the alternative boyfriend while the far more intellectually and politically estimable - and electable - Shelby Steele is not being groomed and being made ready for the inevitable ethnographic face off escapes me entirely.

Sooner or later, Republicans are going to be forced to deal a serious presidential alternative to the "old white men" slur, and the time to recognize that is before sooner gets here.