CAPTURE THE FLAG By Alexander Zaitchik
Can the GOP protect the national-security lie until November?

[T]he administration’s response to 9/11 has been “a catastrophe.”

If you think “catastrophe” is an overstatement, ask yourself a few questions: If Osama bin Laden were guiding the U.S. defense and homeland security budgets, how would he spend the money? Would he triple funds for the Nunn-Lugar Initiative, which seeks to put a firm clamp on loose nuclear materials in the ex-U.S.S.R., or would he pour billions into Cold War crap shoots like missile defense and spaced-based lasers? Would bin Laden have pumped steroids into our anemic human intelligence capability, or would he have pulled Arabic-speaking case officers out of Afghanistan in 2002, then overstretched the U.S. military by launching and escalating a hopeless counterinsurgency war and p.r. shitstorm in oil-rich Iraq? Would he have supported a vigorous investigation into how 9/11 happened and how it could have been stopped, or would he have stonewalled the project, then cut its funding at first chance?

If voters were forced to smell the Bush record up close, we’d be looking down the barrel of a 1964-style Kerry trounce in November, followed by several high-level prosecutions and a steep, generational decline in the fortunes of the Republican Party.

The latest in an uninterrupted stream of post-9/11 examples of backward GOP priorities came last week, when the Republican Senate blocked attempts to increase funding for more than a dozen programs in the 2005 Homeland Security spending bill.