The left tends to believe that Republicans, for whatever reason, are a lot better than Democrats at messaging and salesmanship. In that vein, Martin Longman argues that GOPers have a flair for fabricating issues -- “non-problems,” Longman calls them -- which distract the public from real problems.

“There was the non-problem with Fast & Furious,” wrote Longman in a Friday post. “There was the non-problem of professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Shirley Sherrod and Solyndra and ACORN and in-person voter fraud and the IRS and the so-called Benghazi cover-up and the Ebola panic and now Syrian refugees…We seem to be living in a political world that is driven less by problems than non-problems that the Republicans have dreamed up or trumped up.”

In March 2013, the Republican National Committee released what soon became known as the “autopsy report,” which looked at how the GOP might reverse trends that recently had caused the party to lose the popular vote for the fifth time in six presidential elections. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that conservatives’ hostile response to the report’s big-tent ideas paved the way for the disruptive candidacy of Donald Trump.

“This was all supposed to turn on a dime when the presidential election started,” wrote Longman in a Tuesday post. “All this hate and resentment and bigotry was supposed to just get turned off and Jeb Bush would waltz in with his sunny Reaganesque nobility and his love of amnesty and Common Core and his Mexican wife and family…and the hive would settle down and get back driving around that ideological cul-de-sac like good little stormtroopers. But these aren’t good little stormtroopers. These are genuine ruffians. And they’re having a block party and they’ve got their own music provided by Donald Trump.”

America no longer has a two-party system, argued Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman in a Friday post. That’s because the Republican party is essentially “defunct,” having been sucked into a “vortex of stupid” (i.e., taken over by right-wingers).

“The architects of this vortex,” wrote Longman, “are as varied as Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Regent University jurisprudence, neoconservative foreign policy, the mighty right-wing media wurlitzer, the campaign finance laws, the lack of any accountability for anything ever, the things defending torture does to the human spirit and the brain, the folks who will pay any price to keep science from interfering with their bottom line, what happens when you have to lower your standards to make Ed Meese and Sarah Palin acceptable.”

The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman argues that Republican base voters routinely wind up hurting the party’s center-right presidential nominee because he feels he has to throw them one or more bones: “Poppy [George H. W. Bush] didn’t really need to promise no new taxes, but it was a broken promise that cost him dearly. [John] McCain overcompensated for his weakness with the base by giving us Sarah Palin. And, in his contorted efforts to speak to a base that had become completely unmoored from terrestrial reality, [Mitt] Romney set the land-speed record for lying by a human being.”

The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman sees the Republican party on the horns of a dilemma regarding its 2016 presidential nomination. In a Sunday post, Longman asserted that any candidate who strongly appeals to the GOP base couldn’t win the general election, but acknowledged that it’s understandable that the rank and file would point to several recent losses by center-right nominees and ask, in effect, “This time, why not a real conservative?”

Republican righties, Longman remarked, “are more inclined to test the idea of nominating a fire-breathing conservative who won’t trim their sails. Better to go down swinging tha[n] to unilaterally disarm by caving on principles within your own party.”