Buy Order: Be a Patriot and Patronize marthastewart.com

Eventually, we’ll be able to handle the terrorists, Wall Street will finally settle down, and we may even get through the steroid scandal in major league baseball.

But if Martha Stewart goes down for insider trading, the republic is off the track and headed for the cliff. And as you read this, congressional investigators are circling her like buzzards, and Stewart offered only a half-hearted defense Tuesday while chopping cabbage on CBS’ “The Early Show.”

What is this country’s greatest asset? Purchasing power, that’s what. The first thing President Bush told us to do after Sept. 11 was to go shopping. It was our duty as Americans to restore patriotic confidence and zeal by spending ourselves out of the doldrums.

Why? Because that’s our first line of defense. We’re the most insatiable consumers in the history of the civilized world, and Martha Stewart, with her multimillion-dollar cross-merchandising Omnimedia empire, is our diva.

She is the one who taught us that neither religion nor Prozac is the true path to happiness. The far greater opiate is to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have.

When you can visit marthastewart.com any time of day or night and purchase Venetian lace hemstitch linens, you feel invincible. How can third-world terrorists sleeping in caves be taken seriously?

Unless they’ve visited Stewart’s Web site recently, those mongrels don’t know that delicious salads made with vitamin-rich leafy greens are a staple of healthy summer eating (MasterCard accepted for all utensils).

They don’t know that sorbet, cherries, edible-flower confetti and berries add delicious detail to serving plates (the Wedgwood white bone china is $60 per place setting).

The terrorists might actually be using tiki torches during outdoor entertaining, but they are most likely unaware that party songs “should be easygoing, carefree, and fun.” (Martha’s Summer Entertaining CD, for just $11.98, features “Groovin’ ” by the Young Rascals and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” by Dionne Warwick.)

We’d be adrift without her.

Not only did Stewart bring graceful home decorating possibilities to millions of Kmart shoppers, but as a product of modest Polish immigrant parents, she represented the dream. With the right marketing and the luck of timing, you could become a billionaire in this country on the strength of one good bundt cake recipe.

Tell us it ain’t so, Martha.

America needs to believe you didn’t get a heads up when you dumped $227,000 worth of ImClone Systems stock the day before the FDA rejected ImClone’s application for a cancer drug.

ImClone’s former chief executive, a pal of yours, was collared by FBI agents and charged with securities fraud and conspiracy. Then your broker got dumped amid swirling controversy and conflicting statements over a call he placed to you the day you bailed out.

We can live with the knowledge that corporate America is ruled by a band of shameless chief executives who’d steal from their own grandmothers. Enron, Global Crossing, Rite Aid, Tyco, Arthur Andersen and a dozen others are prime examples of capitalism run amok.

But we can’t accept the possibility that the doyenne who rescued us from our least flattering sense of ourselves--someone who speaks to us in a hopeful, reassuring manner about proper stemware and a taco dinner that’s as much fun to prepare as it is to eat--might actually be an imperial, corner-cutting shrew.

In her hallmark appearance on “The Early Show,” Stewart assured the masses she would be “exonerated of any ridiculousness.” She was chopping cabbage at the time because summer is best for salads, and there appeared to be no shredded documents in the recipe.

But this is no time for Martha’s trademark composure. Stewart, who often looks as though she’s just donated plasma, needs to shake a fist in her own defense, or at least part her lips while speaking. Nothing less than the fate of the republic is at stake.

I’m looking for something along the lines of Nixon’s televised “Checkers” speech, in which he denied financial improprieties and defiantly refused to give back a cocker spaniel that had been a gift to his children.

Or Stewart ought to just look us in the eye and say of course she bent a few rules and grabbed what she could, but it wasn’t nearly as much as those plundering male CEOs who never get locked up. Doesn’t everyone want something they don’t have, anyway, like an extra hundred million dollars, or maybe Venetian lace hemstitch linens?

Now that her porcelain image is cracked, Stewart’s own stock is tumbling and, for national security interests, we can’t let that happen. The enemy already thinks he’s got us on the run, living in fear of the next hit and losing confidence in capitalism.

Show your support for Martha and the American way by visiting Stewart’s Summer Garden Party Store online and purchasing a set of Bistro Linens (starting at $46). And if you believe, as President Bush and I do, that shopping is an act of patriotism, pick up an All-American cake stencil set ($30) for the Fourth of July and “transform a cake into a star-spangled display.”

Lord knows none of us can bear the thought of Martha making jailhouse Christmas ornaments out of metal shavings and navel lint.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.