If its true as Clfford Geertz argues that we get trapped in webs of significance and meaning that we spin ourselves, then Kerry certainly got trapped in his own web.

Time and again, when it came to challenging Bush on foreign policy and the war on terror, Kerry proved largely ineffective. It was as if Kerry was running not against George Bush, but against George McGovern (and Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis). From his salute and "reporting for duty declaration" (what idiot came up with that?) at the convention to the debates with Bush, to the last week of the campaign, Kerry limited his critiques only to issues of competence. He remained trapped in a neo-realist foreign policy vision, unable to offer any vision at all.

To have uttered the words during the campaign "they hate us for our policies" would have been to leave himself open to charges of McGovernism. But now we know that even Bush knows that they don't hate us for our freedom, but for our policies.

What would it take for a Democratic candidate to offer a gutsy, neo-Wilsonian (I mean a real Neo-Wilsonian) alternative to the psuedo Neo-Wilsonianism of the Bush administration? Is this possible? Or is to do so, to be defined as "McGovern"?

A friend and colleague of mine just down the hall from me recently sent the following letter to the local newspaper in Southern Ohio. I will let the letter (posted here with his knowledge and permission) speak for itself.To the Editor:

There are many reasons why Kerry lost, and though it still seems improbable to me, one cannot definitively rule out fraud. Nonetheless, there were so many missed opportunities. Democrats were by and large ineffective when they went head to head with Republicans on cable news. One factor that has been ruled out is the appearance of Osama Bin Laden's videotape in the final days of the campaign. By shifting the media focus from Bush incompetence and Republican spin machine mendacity, this tape may have broken Kerry's momentum and thrown the election for Bush.

In the last week of the campaign the story about the missing explosives in Iraq surfaced. This was one opportunity the Kerry camp didn't miss. Republican talking heads such as Kate O'Brien of National Review were virtually stammering in a desperate bid to find the correct spin to this story.

Soon however the Republican spin machine found its footing. The line became "we couldn't know what happened to the explosives". On and on it went in a constant drum beat of how it would have been impossible for the explosives to have been looted and driven off with so many US soldiers around. And of course, we were told that the explosives may have been carted up and shipped off by Saddam.

And then it happened. Videotape of the explosives surfaced as did testimony from soldiers that they had witnessed and been essentially powerless to stop the looting. The first Republican tactic was denial. Racicot, either didn't know or wouldn't admit to the existence of the videotape as he rudely cut off Sharpton time and gain.

But by Thursday, the story had become impossible to deny. Not only was Bush now going to be exposed as incompetent, but the Republican spin machine was going to have egg all over its face the whole weekend. Kerry's momentum was clearly building. It would soon be clear that Kerry had told the truth and made a correct call while Republicans had either lied outright or used half truths to create false impression of the story. This was set to be the "THE STORY" of the weekend heading into the election.

Instead, "THE STORY" became Osama Bin Laden. Kerry's poll numbers did a small dip and rebounded. And it is this "rebound" that has led people to argue that Osama did not throw the election for Bush. But that is the point: Kerry's momentum and possible surge in the polls was broken by Osama's appearance.

Of course, there are many reasons why Kerry lost. But it still seems possible that Osama tipped the balance at the every end. If nothing else, Osama's experience buried (seemingly permananently) a story about Bush's incompetence and Republican willingness to spin even in the face of amazingly inconvenient facts.

As I listened to the news this morning and read various papers something occurred to me. There are more of "us" than there of "them". That this issue comes down to "us" vs. "them" is a tragedy, but the fact is that "they" see "us" as "them" and "they" have no doubt about the fact that they are fighting a spiritual and political war against "us". By now of course, it is obvious that I am speaking about the "religious right".

It is now estimated that 25% of the electorate voted on the basis of an amorphous phrase "moral values". This alone is a far cry from the much vaunted 42% of the American public considering themselves "evangelical". I have always thought this figure inflated, but even taking it at face value it shows that the evangelical vote is not a monolithic block. When we add in conservative Catholic voters the numbers grow. But at most, we are talking about a quarter of the electorate-not a majority, not even a significant plurality-but a minority of the electorate who have taken extreme positions on abortion rights (they want to ban all abortions), gay marriage (they oppose any recognition of gay couples at all), want to impose prayer in schools, teach creationism-and this is really just for starters. What they really want is a theocracy.

In past elections people were willing to stand up to these people. Many thought that they cost Bob Dole the election. They were absent (officially) from the 2004 Republican convention. But they were intensely active at the grassroots. Now for some reason, people view them as a monolith that we must pander to in order to win votes.

This is nonsense. America is a religiously plural society. Many (I might even say most) Christians do not share the evangelical/fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Most Americans believe in God, but they also believe in science and reason. And they also beleive in tolerance and they also believe in separation of church and state. There are more Americans who want separation of church and state, who are against banning abortions, who will accept civil unions, who don't want to force children to pray in schools and who want science to be taught in science classrooms-than there are who want the opposite.

The religious right has now thrown down the gauntlet. They have attacked (and apparently cowed) Arlen Specter. They are claiming (and I beleive this claim is overstated) that they elected Bush and that they are now "owed" action.

And yet their leaders have said things in public like "God allowed 9/11 to happen because of gays, humanists and atheists" or "Islam is a gutter religion". Their leaders are deeply intolerant.

We do not need to pander to intolerance. We can confront intolerance and we can seize this debate. And we can allow the Republican Party to tether itself to the religious right and watch the Specters, Schwarzenneggers and Giuilanis make their choices.

This is a winnable fight. There are more of us than there are of them. We can respect faith and religion while taking on the extremists.

There is an important debate that we need to have and it seems to me that Andrew Sullivan will do his best to stop that debate. On tonight's Bill Maher, after Noam Chomsky's brief appearance, Andrew Sullivan ripped into Chomsky with several distortions of Chomsky's view. He also got in his digs at Michael Moore and Michael Moore's supporters. According to Sullivan, Michael Moore showed pre-invasion Iraq as a peaceful, tranquil place. Similarly, Sullivan went on to allege that Chomsky was against democracy and freedom and in favor of tyranny.

Anybody who listened to Chomsky's brief interview with Bill Maher would have clearly heard the opposite. Chomsky made it clear that he thought Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. He condemned the US for having previously supported Saddam Hussein and a number of other tyrants around the world. Chomsky asserted that in the absence of sanctions the Iraqi people would have taken care of Saddam Hussein himself. On that score Sullivan's critique of Chomsky was a smear-a smear he repeated at increasing volume.

Sullivan was incensed that Chomsky would apply the Nuremberg conventions to the US. But what Chomsky said was was that the invasion of Iraq by the US was a violation of the underlying principle of the Nuremberg conventions and thus constituted an aggressive war. And again, Chomsky (as well as Maher) both stated their view clearly that they believed Saddam was a brutal dictator. Chomsky's larger point was that if the US is going to claim that it upholds international law, it must abide by international law.

Sullivan however seems to want to preclude any discussion of this insight. America, he concedes, is flawed. One of the flaws is the incompetence with which the invasion of Iraq was carried out. But apparently, one cannot critique (at least not without being accused of being soft on tyranny) the underlying rationale for invading Iraq. One may not apparently (again, at least not without being associated as an enemy of the US in Sullivan's rhetoric) bring to light the US support of Saddam Hussein in the past by some of the very same architects of the US invasion of Iraq. The Democrats, according to Sullivan, lost the election because of people like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky who "hate" America.

As a theory of geopolitics Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11 was flawed. There were places where Moore's film could have been strengthened. Similarly, Chomsky represents an extreme critique of US foreign policy and has at times (in my estimation) overstated his case with respect to US foreign policy. There are fair critiques of people like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. But they bring a perspective to the debate that needs to be addressed.

The war in Iraq has been conducted with spectacular incompetence. And that needs to be brought to light and discussed. But those who viewed the war as wrong not just as a tactic, but wrong in principle have a point to bring to this debate as well. The figure that Chomsky quoted of 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq is probably too high. But the silence about the more probable 30,000 deaths of Iraqi civilians has been stunning. The fact that it is now estimated that a significant portion (nobody knows for sure) of Fallujah residents have fled the city has been simply shrugged off.

It is now just simply bad form to bring up past US support for Central American death squads. US support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980's when he gassed the Kurds is rarely mentioned, though his actions against the Kurds were often used to justify the invention and to prove his willingness to use chemical weapons.

And this is the point. The debate on the US exercise of power is being reduced to a sterile non-debate by people like Andrew Sullivan. The only point to be debated is the competent use of power, rather than the assumptions and arrogance of power that lead to that incompetence.

There are valid critiques to be made of Chomsky and Moore and there have been many times when I felt both overreached, or, in Michael Moore's case, missed a point that would have made a stronger story.

All this said I think that Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky deserve to be heard and have their critiques fairly debated. Sullivan in his self-righteous moral outrage is capable of only issuing declarative, sweeping condemnations. But he contributed nothing to the debate.

This is my first diary and I'm still fairly new to MyDD, but I think this story is important enough to just jump in. We need to spread it and make sure it doesn't get buried.

According to: San Francisco Chronicle soldiers witnessed looting of weapons at Al QaQua. Combined with the videotaped footage of the HMX this story puts the nail in the coffin of Marc Racicot's and the rest of the Republican disinformation campaign's public dissembling on this story.

The Republicans are hard at work to reconstruct the myth of Kerry as a candidate who overreached and would "say anything". Their constant pounding on this theme is likely to be picked by the supposedly liberal media (SLM)and become the new truth as defined by talking heads.

During the campaign, Racicot and other Republicans hammered away at the point that there we couldn't know what happened to the HMX and that it was impossible (or nearly so) to believe the HMX was looted while the US drove tanks and trucks up and down the road.

The video showing the HMX and now eyewitness accounts of looting of explosives at the site by US soldiers finally provides clear evidence for what was the most logical explanation at the time.

About a week ago it seemed that this story was destined to be "The story" of the final weekend before the campaign. Kerry would have gone into the election riding a wave of momentum and a story that clearly put egg all over Republican faces and their disinformation machine.

Though polls didn't appear to show a Bush bounce from the OBL tapes, it did break the building momentum of the story.

As we all knew at the time: Kerry told the truth and Republicans as usual played a game of engaging in half truths and distorted information.