BEFORE THE BOSTON BODIES WERE COLD, RIGHT-WINGERS PUT PARTY AHEAD OF COUNTRY

If Maureen Dowd really wants to know why a gun control bill couldn't pass in Washington, she shouldn't be examining President Obama's tactical skills -- she should be looking at the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, and asking herself how it's even possible to negotiate with a party that relentlessly politicizes everything, including (especially including) this attack.

How do you work with these people? The bodies weren't even cold and Lindsey Graham was pressuring the administration to treat Dhokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant. John McCain piled on, arguing the same thing; so did Congressman Peter King on one of the Sunday talk shows. Graham went on TV Sunday and attacked the FBI; Michael McCaul, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, did the same.

Want to know what Democrats were saying in 2001 on the first Sunday shows after 9/11? Want to know how divisive they were?

Here's John Kerry on CNN's Late Edition on Septenber 16, 2001, talking to Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: Senator Kerry, you're of course well-known as a Vietnam veteran. When the United States got involved in the early '60s in Vietnam it looked a lot different, of course, than when the U.S. left in the '70s. Are you at all concerned that what the U.S. is getting itself involved in right now could turn out to be another Vietnam?

KERRY: No, I mean, it just isn't. There isn't even any comparison. The country is united, galvanized, I think is the word, because we have been attacked in the most clear and dastardly way.

I mean, every American understands the nature of this threat.

Here's then-senator Hillary Clinton on ABC's This Week the same Sunday:

I am absolutely confident that the president and his advisers will put together a plan that will take into account the great difficulty that we face.

Here's Senator Charles Schumer on CBS's Face the Nation the same day, praising President Bush's willingness to offer a generous amount of federal aid to New York in the wake of 9/11:

SCHUMER: But he didn't have to do this. We're part of the blue states, you know. We're not part of his political sort of coalition.

And the fact that he was so generous, and then, late that night, when some in the Senate didn't want to do it, he stood them down, and said, "We have to do this." It speaks for his ability to unify the nation, and Hillary and I are both just really grateful to him for his leadership and his help for New York, as we are to all of America.

That's how divisive top Democrats were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

The unofficial media office of the Republican Party, otherwise known as Rupert Murdoch's media empire, is even less restrained than GOP members of Congress. A Wall Street Journal editorial reinforces the call for enemy combatant status and attacks the FBI. The Journal editorial page publishes an implicit call for enhanced interrogation from ex-Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey:

But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry -- a lot.

For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.

At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?

Fox & Friends did an extraordinarily sympathetic interview with Greg Ball, a Republican state legislator from New York, who overtly called for the torture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:

“Were you surprised that people responded to it?” asked [Gretchen] Carlson.

“I think a lot of politicians, quite honestly, are full of crap,” Ball replied candidly. “They’re scared to say how they feel. I basically said what I believe a lot of red-blooded Americans felt.”

He said that getting information from terror suspects can save lives, and he “would be first in line” to use whatever tactics are necessary to extract that information, including torture.

And the weekend edition of Fox & Friends attacked Attorney General Eric Holder, primarily using a guest named Alonzo Lunsford, who was injured in the Fort Hood shooting:

[Gretchen] Carlson opened with the leading question, "The question may be, is this administration too politically correct to deal with the harsh realities of terror attacks when they occur on American soil?"

Lunsford was in synch with the Fox agenda. He quickly asked, "How many more times are we gonna let events like this happen on U.S. soil?" Saying we need to "stop being reactive" to terrorist attacks and "start being proactive," he added, "We have enough power and enough technology in our grasp where we can stop this from happening." When asked by co-host Alisyn Camerota what might have been done to prevent the Boston bombings, he said the Boston Marathon area should have been "more secure" and that the FBI should have bore down harder on now-deceased Boston suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev when they first interviewed him "until he is no longer a threat."

Find me anything like this in the mainstream "liberal" press, or from prominent Democratic politicians, in the first week after the 9/11 attacks. Go on, show me. Yes, we eventually were at loggerheads as a nation -- after bin Laden got away, after postwar transitions failed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, after weapons of mass destruction weren't found in Iraq, and after torture was uncovered. But the first week? No.

In the first week after 9/11, the mainstream press and D.C. Democrats rallied around the flag. In the week after the Boston bombings, the GOP rallied around the GOP.

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UPDATE: Typos fixed.