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.

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?