Zaitchik: "Catastrophic" doesn't exaggerate Bush's national security

[Alpharetta]

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

By Alexander Zaitchik

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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?

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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. What were the proposed increases? You know, diamond-tiaras-for-black-teenage-mothers-type stuff: $300 million dollars for port security, $146 million for firefighters, $70 million to track shipments of hazardous materials, $50 million for more federal Air Marshals, $70 million to secure chemical plants, $625 million for discretionary grants for high-threat, high-density urban areas, $350 million to improve security at points of entry into the United States.

Exactly the kind of pinko pork you'd expect a senator from Massachusetts to waste your tax dollars on. The backdrop for this newfound financial restraint is of course the bloody cesspool in Iraq, for which the same Senate, Dick Cheney presiding, has already approved $144 billion and counting. (To watch the numbers blur before your eyes, day and night, see projectbillboard.org and iraqbodycount.org.)

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If the Democrats can't make the case for strategic competence over "moral clarity" between now and then, then maybe the Jesus freaks deserve the country, after all.

Go to this NY Press link for the full withering column.