"Syria Vote Sets Up Foreign Policy Clash Within the G.O.P." is the headline over a story getting big play on the Times home page. It depicts Republicans as divided into a libertarian/isolationist wing and a traditionalist/hawk/interventionist wing; Rand Paul and Justin Amash versus John McCain and Mike Rogers.
Fair enough, I suppose, but where's the top-of -the-home-page coverage of the foreign policy clash within the Democratic Party? President Clinton's labor secretary, Robert Reich, opposes action against Syria, calls President Obama's logic "dubious" and accuses him of favoring "brute force." A Democratic Congressman from Florida, Alan Grayson, said, "There is nobody in my district who is so concerned about the well-being of people in Syria that they would prefer to see us spend billions of dollars on a missile attack against Syria than to spend exactly the same amount of money on schools or roads or health care...Nobody wants this except the military-industrial complex." Another Democrat in Congress, Charles Rangel, told MSNBC, "There's no evidence that what's happening in Syria is a threat to our national security," and he said that if a vote were held now to authorize military force, he would oppose it.
The Times article on the Republicans trots out all the usual journalistic hype: "fierce internal debates...divisions...have flared...those intermittent spats could pale in comparison with the fight over whether to attack Syria." Where are the flaring divisions, spats, and fights among the Democrats? They are there, but for some reason the Times doesn't seem to consider them worth a story.