Obviously President Bush was not prepared for the cheers that greeted his statement that “Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act are set to expire next year.” Amazing: you’ll find civil libertarians in the darndest places — even the U.S. Congress!

What was really strange was what happened next. PATRIOT Act supporters were clearly itching to counter this act of lese majeste by showing their support for the president. What did they do? They cheered his next line: “The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule.”

Unfortunately, every single senator, congressmen and dignitary who clapped at that moment was applauding the continued existence of the terrorist threat. “Hurray! The terrorists are here to stay!” Not too bright.

Then again, since so many of our leaders, right up to the president, found their political lives salvaged by 9/11, maybe they understood exactly what they were doing.

A straw-man argument is one that “simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position.” President Bush’s State of the Union address hinged on the construction of a towering straw man designed to intimidate his opponents by absurdly misrepresenting them.

In a piece of rhetoric that displayed immense tactical skill — and profound depths of calculated deception — Bush declared, before the assembled U.S. Congress and the American people, that only he can be trusted to fight the war on terror because his opponents don’t believe there’s anything to worry about:

“We have faced serious challenges together — and now we face a choice. We can go forward with confidence and resolve — or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us.”

After 9/11, that would be a “dangerous illusion” indeed. But who could Bush be talking about? If you look at the positions of every single credible Democratic candidate, of the great majority of Democratic officeholders and indeed the vast majority of Democratic voters, you will search in vain for anyone who argues that “terrorists are not plotting.” The debate is over means, not ends — over whether we should reelect a government that has failed in two and a half years since Sept. 11 to apprehend the masterminds of the 9/11 attack, that has distracted the nation with an elective war in Iraq and that has thrown wrenches in the works of serious efforts to analyze the failures that led to 9/11.

Then there’s the charge that opponents say “outlaw regimes are no threat to us.” Notice the seamless expansion of the “war on terror,” which has now also become a “war on outlaw regimes.” Even if you accept that bit of war-aims inflation, though, you will again search in vain for a single serious Democrat who maintains that “outlaw regimes are no threat to us.” Howard Dean said — accurately, though he was vilified for it — that the U.S. was no safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein than it was before. (He also said, accurately, that the U.S. troops in Iraq probably were safer, but that part doesn’t get quoted as much.) That’s very different from saying “outlaw regimes are no threat.”

Many of us who felt the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised believed, and still believe, that the war on terror should foremost be a war on al-Qaida. That there was and is no credible evidence that Saddam and al-Qaida were in cahoots. That the invasion of Iraq would serve as a distraction from the war on al-Qaida. That the evidence Saddam posed an immediate threat to the U.S. was and is nonexistent. That a process of confronting Saddam that relied more on our allies would be more geopolitically effective, more cost-effective and less careless with American soldiers’ lives. And that the failure of U.S. intelligence and policy-making in assessing the pre-war threat was of a piece with the failure of the Bush administration to plan for the post-war “nation-building” phase.

No one is saying “outlaw regimes are no threat.” What a lot of us are saying is, the Bush regime is doing a poor job of handling the real threats. While we finally pack in the inspectors and admit (despite Bush’s desperate parsing of the word “program”) that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, we face a regime in North Korea that clearly does have such weapons. Does Kim Jong Il look at Iraq and think, “Oh no, look at how quickly Bush toppled Saddam, I’m in trouble”? Or does he think, “I’m glad the U.S. is so busy trying to protect its helicopters in Baghdad — that gives me a chance to stockpile more nukes”?

To review an accurate scorecard of the nation’s wins and losses in the war on terror so far would be too damning of the president’s performance. So instead his State of the Union lunged for the crudest advantage: “If you don’t support me and my policies, you must think there’s no threat at all.”

Even when reviewing his real policy achievements, like Libya’s new willingness to renounce its nuclear program, Bush couldn’t help overreaching. According to Bush, Qaddafi’s cave-in demonstrates that, “For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible — and no one can now doubt the word of America.”

Unfortunately, thanks to the distortions and lies the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq and still defends in the face of the most implacable facts, most of the globe now does doubt the word of America. And anyone following the political fray now has further reason to doubt Bush’s own word. His State of the Union straw-man represents the current nadir in the rhetorical fallout of the war on terror. But the election is still far off: If this is how low Bush is willing to stoop even while he’s riding high, wait till his poll numbers sink.

Light blogging here as we devoted considerable energy this week to the launch of War Room ‘04, our new group blog. Spearheaded by our new senior news editor, Geraldine Sealey, and featuring contributions from across Salon’s staff, War Room will be a centerpiece of Salon’s election-year coverage, and we’ve got more features to roll out in coming days and weeks (including, soon, an RSS feed for it).

We wanted to publish War Room as a blog within Salon’s existing content management system, so its content would be integrated with our search and directory. That meant we couldn’t just pull an existing blogging tool off the shelf; we had to write our own — or rather wrestle the existing software we use to publish articles into a different form. This is something I’ve been waiting for and advocating we do for, well, for as long as we’ve been rolling our own software — since early ‘99, when we were still producing the blog-like “In Box” for Salon Technology but had to update and archive everything by hand. I recall conversations with different developers at different stages of Salon’s evolution about the need to flow small items through our site. We sat and talked about how we might do it (”we’ll call them ’storettes’!”, I recall one programmer deciding), but we never got around to doing it because there was always something more pressing and revenue-related for our production team to focus on.

So hats off to our crew, especially Dominic Dela Cruz and Max Garrone, who did the heaviest lifting, for getting this up and running. I’ll continue to blog here, of course, but you’ll also find some of my commentary over in War Room.

MoveOn wants to run the winning ad in its “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest during the Super Bowl.
Advertising Age quotes a CBS spokesperson saying that “he didn’t think it was likely that the spot would pass standards and practices.”

The MoveOn “Child’s Pay” ad is a substantive argument about the deficit, contains no allusions to Nazism and features images far tamer than overgrown men battering one another for possession of a scrap of pigskin. If CBS refuses to run it, MoveOn should mobilize a mass boycott of the network. Hell, we wouldn’t miss much.

Slashdot already has this link, but some information bears as wide distribution as possible! CNN reports on a study that says avid Net users watch less TV but aren’t geeky hermits at all:

There’s a certain amount of leeway we need to give the American media in election season. Certainly, when a Democratic candidate chooses to wear an argyle sweater, it’s essential news. Or when the spouse of another one decides to dress as most adult Americans today do when they have a choice, in sneakers and jeans? Okay, put it on the front page.

But there are some stories that are just too trivial to bother with. I mean, does it matter that it looks like the vice president of the United States is about to be investigated for his role in an international bribery scandal? Can we really expect the American voter to care?

That seems to be the editorial decision being made across U.S. newsrooms — which have, with minimal exception, ignored a percolating story about Dick Cheney’s possible involvement in a shady Nigerian deal that a French judge is probing.

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, now deeply enmeshed in the reconstruction of Iraq, is being investigated in France over “$180 million in payments connected with a huge Nigerian liquefied natural gas plant project won in the 1990s by a joint venture that included a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.,” according to the Dallas Morning News’ story last weekend — the only significant U.S. press coverage for this story. All of this took place while Cheney was Halliburton’s CEO. (There’s more over at the Center for American Progress.)

Now, it’s true that this investigation is proceeding in France, and we all know what the Bush administration thinks of the French. No one knows where this story will go, or whether we’ll ultimately learn whether Cheney was involved. Still, you’d think the story would merit a little notice.

But I guess the nation’s reporters and editors have more important matters to focus on. After all, if they spent too much time looking into Halliburton’s past, they might miss a vein bulging on some Democratic candidate’s forehead. And we couldn’t have that, could we?

I am not nearly enough of a physicist to understand the full implications of the possible creation at the Brookhaven National Laboratory of “a primordial form of matter” known as quark-gluon plasma. As reported in today’s Times, this “goo” last existed during the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.

What I can say for certain is that the term “quark-gluon plasma” is a winner. Science is learning not to label things with latinate polysyllables. Today’s physics is powered by short, chewy, phonically rich terms that fire the imagination.

Quark-gluon plasma! I can just see Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, polka dots pulsating, chanting the words like an offering to the void.

There’s been a remarkable flow of emperor’s-new-clothes-type snapshots of the Bush administration from Ron Suskind’s book based on former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s White House recollections. Of all of them, one strikes me as especially outrageous — more so than the charge that Bush entered office intending to oust Saddam (we pretty much knew that already, didn’t we?): Dick Cheney’s dismissal of O’Neill’s concern over his administration’s surplus-squandering, budget-busting, deficit-ballooning, generation-betraying tax cuts.

When O’Neill raised the issue after the 2002 elections, the book says, Cheney told him,
“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. Matter how, exactly? Reagan proved that you can win re-election despite running up huge deficits — and I suppose what Cheney is saying here is that that is all that matters to him. We can run a huge deficit and still win re-election, so who cares?

That makes a certain hardball sense. But a little voice in the back of our heads nags us with other pieces of history: like the fact that Reagan eventually came to see that bankrupting the government was not a good idea, and both he and his successor — our current president’s father — agreed to tax increases that laid the foundation for the booming, job-creating, surplus-endowing economy of the ’90s.

And then there is the little matter of the impact of deficits beyond the election. I suppose I should not be surprised that our most boardroom-brained, most corporate presidential administration should specialize in the sort of short-term thinking that has plagued so many American businesses. But sooner or later the national debt will come home to roost, engulfing us in runaway inflation, painful tax increases, decimation of services or some miserable combination of these calamities. If the late ’90s was an era of ostrich-like wishful thinking on the part of stock-market speculators who couldn’t imagine the good times ever ending, Bush, Cheney and company are recapitulating the same mentality today — except, instead of playing fast and loose with investors’ money, they’re doing it with the entire U.S. economy.

Deficits don’t matter. Up to a point, sure. But by any measure, we are way past that point. “We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations,” Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address. But his economic policy could fairly be called “leave every child behind.”

That’s the awful, eerie poignance of “Child’s Play,” the winning entrant in MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest. May every American voter watch it, and weep.
CORRECTION: Whoops, the spot’s name is “Child’s Pay.” An actual clever title, not the cliche my eyes mistook.

I’m glad that Howard Dean, the doctor running for president, is raising the issue of Bush’s shameful stem-cell research policy. (I wrote about it in 2001, when it was announced.) Bush’s wrongheaded plan restricts vital medical research using a religious rationale that, if consistently applied, would also require the banning of a wide variety of commonly used fertility treatments. That would cause a political uproar, of course, and when has Bush ever cared about consistency? His Rove-driven policies are all about targeting electoral constituencies. Released in the summer before 9/11 with considerable ballyhoo, Bush’s stem-cell research ban (that’s essentially what it is, though he trumpeted a dubious loophole allowing extremely limited research to proceed) got lost in the post-9/11 news torrent. Dean deserves credit for putting this story back in the spotlight and reminding us where Bush went wrong.

The “liberal” label has been on a long journey from its Victorian-era origins — the root is from the Latin for “free,” of course, and the original liberals were proponents of free trade (which means that today’s anti-globalism liberals have now come a full 180 degrees).

Jeff Jarvis has been posting recently about the meaning of the term “liberal” today. Jarvis’s ardent pro-war positions have placed him at odds with a lot of people who think of themselves as liberals, but he’s determined not to give up the label.

Good for him: Liberalism should be a big tent, and surely, just as there were “Cold War liberals” who shared some positions, but not all, with their dovish liberal coevals, there has to be room for “terror war liberals” today — even if their conversations with their antiwar brethren escalate into shouting matches.

This discussion prompted Jarvis to offer extensive quotes from a 1960 John F. Kennedy speech defining liberalism. What’s fascinating to me about Kennedy’s rhetoric is not to try to parse how it relates to today’s war debate (I don’t think it much does at all) but rather to notice the one gigantic thing it’s missing: It’s entirely secular. No mention of God. No dutiful punching of the religious-belief card. All the beliefs are specifically and proudly humanist:

Human dignity — not divine dignity — as the source of national purpose. Faith in our fellow citizens — not faith in a deity or a scripture. For Kennedy, as a Catholic trying to become the first president of his faith, keeping God out of his politics made perfect political sense, but it also made moral sense. It still does.

Kennedy’s speech reminds us that one of the key freedoms liberals hold dear is freedom from state religion. By keeping government out of religion, we keep religion free for each individual. And one of the things that unites liberals today is a deep anger at our present administration’s deliberate efforts to mix up religion with government. There’s a constituency for that, to be sure. But don’t underestimate the liberal constituency. I’ve still got some “faith in my fellow citizens as individuals.”