Rich Galen jokes today about the way the media tends to play up Republican spats as major fratricide, and downplay Democratic feuding as harmless and meaningless, un-newsworthy, really:

If a Republican Member of Congress doesn’t hold the door for another member of the Republican Conference on their way into the Members’ Dining Room it will be immediately reported as a “growing evidence of bad blood and the disintegration of any semblance of unity within the ranks of the GOP.” But … If two Democrats get into a knife fight on the west lawn of the Capitol, sandwiched between a Burr-Hamilton-like gun duel, and a tomahawk-tossing contest it will be reported – if it is reported at all – as “a frank exchange of views.”