Roiling with the GOP

Headline:
Flap over pet projects roils GOP

And it’s about how some Republican Congressmen are upset about earmarks and excessive spending by other Republicans in Congress, including the Republican leadership in Congress.  Is someone being roiled?  Yes.  Are they Republicans?  Yes.  Do they represent the “GOP”?  Of course not.  This stuff wouldn’t be an issue if a majority of the GOP was roiled by this stuff.  Heck, if even a quarter of the Republicans in Congress were truly “roiled” by this, they could probably vote with the Dems to stop this crap.  So this obviously isn’t a very large contingent of GOPers being roiled.  Hell, someone reading the headline would probably assume that the pet projects were non-GOP items.

And isn’t the obvious word they were looking for “divides”?  Flap over pet projects divides GOP?  That’s what the story is about; how Republicans are divided over this issue.  So why didn’t they write that in the headline?  I’d be lying if I said I knew the answer, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that this is yet another outcome of rightwingers “Playing the Refs” and getting editors to downplay headlines and stories which depict Republicans negatively.  Plus, there’s the issue that the traditional storyline is that Democrats are the hopelessly divided ones, and perhaps it doesn’t seem appropriate to the editors to show Repubs in a similar light.  Whatever it is, this is pretty lame.