A front-page article in today's Times appears under the headline, "G.O.P. Divided On Proper Role For U.S. Abroad."
"Republicans divided" is one of the Times' favorite themes, and, though I haven't made a formal study of it, it seems a story that gets written up more often than the story of the no-less-divided Democrats. But the main point here isn't so much the disparate treatment of Democrats and Republicans, but the language that the Times uses to describe the divide.
The article begins, "For more than three decades, the Republican Party brand has been deeply tied to a worldview in which the aggressive use of American power abroad is both a policy imperative and a political advantage."
A smarter editor would have deleted the word "brand," which is unnecessary. But the real problem word in the sentence is "aggressive." It recurs in the article as a straw-man shorthand description of the foreign policy about which the Republicans are supposedly newly divided. Senator McCain, for example, is described as "his party's most prominent spokesman for an aggressive foreign policy."
But the word "aggressive" may mean, or at least connote, tending to commit unprovoked acts of hostility. That's a tendentious and not necessarily accurate description of a Republican foreign policy of peace through strength, or of robust, bold support for freedom and democracy abroad, or of rolling back the Soviet empire and taking the fight against Islamist extremist terrorism to the ground of our enemies. In other words, in the face of an expansionist, sinister Soviet Communist empire and an Islamist terrorist network that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and wants to reestablish a caliphate in Europe, a firm and activist, even interventionist, foreign policy isn't "aggressive," it's defensive.
The Times's choice of language to cover this story about "G.O.P Divided," in other words, gives a strong clue about which side of the divide the Times itself is on.