The Republicans are having a hard time grabbing the national security stage. I mean when they have to look at facing President Obama next year, the man who got Osama Bin Laden, they really don’t have much to go on.

So what is a poor Republican candidate to do? Make shit up!

Republican presidential candidates have claimed that the Obama administration is cleansing government files of references to radical Islam, an assertion so juicy that politicians keep repeating it — even though it’s a wild exaggeration.

The latest to run with the story is former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who told a crowd in Des Moines that the president “actually ordered all references to Islam and Muslim sanitized out of our national security documents.”

And over the weekend, Newt Gingrich told a veterans’ forum in Des Moines that the administration has “issued instructions, for example, that in developing training papers on terrorism that no mention should be made of radical Islam.”

Rep. Michele Bachmann paved the way on Oct. 28, when she told 75 Republican faithful in Iowa that “Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual.”

It turns out that all this came from an incident in 2009 when someone from the FBI gave a speech that drew a lot of criticism from the Muslim community. An order to review training material was given and some is being rewritten, but not by “terrorist” groups as Bachmann claimed. Instead it’s being taken care of by a couple FBI agents and three outside experts from terrorist organizations such as Yale University and Johns Hopkins.

Of course facts are pesky things, as another famous Republican once said (**cough** Ronald Reagan) and Bachmann still believes that Barack Obama started the Iraq War.

Bet ya didn’t know that a state Senator has the power to declare war – did ya?