#swiftboating

[porterdavis]

[gwydionmisha]

BREAKING: The New York Times helps JD Vance Swiftboat Tim Walz

Tell the news media not to privilege Republican lies about Tim Walz's military service

[janedrewfinally]

Minnesota National Guard officials weigh in on Walz service

Walz has come under sustained fire over his decision to retire, following 24 years of service in various Guard units, while his battalion wa

"Since the announcement he would join Vice President Kamala Harris atop the party ticket, Walz has come under sustained fire over his decision to retire following 24 years of service in various Guard units while his battalion was allegedly under orders to deploy or set to soon receive orders, and over his use of the Command Sergeant Major rank in campaign messaging.

However, according to information shared by multiple official sources within the MNG, Walz earned that rank and would need either the gift of prophecy or a time machine to use the deployment as an excuse to leave the service, as his May 2005 retirement date came months before the 1-125th Battalion of the 1st Brigade Combat Team learned they would mobilize and most of a year before the unit was actually deployed to Iraq for what would become a historically long, 22-month tour.

According to Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the MNG’s State Public Affairs Officer, Walz “served from April 8, 1981, to May 16, 2005″ during which time he “held multiple positions within field artillery such as firing battery chief, operations sergeant, first sergeant, and culminated his career serving as the command sergeant major for the battalion....

Walz’s official May retirement date came almost two full months before the 1-125 Field Artillery found out they would likely mobilize. An official order was not issued until a month after that, about 90 days after Walz left the service, according to information provided by Lt. Col. Ryan Rossman, the MNG’s Director of Operations.”

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

Spooky Stories at Camp Quarantine: The Tale of the Swift Boat

Campfire story (n): a ritual where we all sit under the vast darkness of a midnight sky and tell ourselves a story about the big, scary monster that isn’t lurking just out of sight. You know. Probably.

2004 was a dark and stormy year.

The world pulsed with the still-raw trauma of the September 11 attacks. It was an anxious year of denial and bargaining, a desperate search for the loophole after Sirius Black fell through the veil. The twentieth century was dying and the third millennium was struggling to be born. It was the time of the Swift Boat.

The Usurper Bush the Lesser was in a tough place. If you were paying attention, you could see the signs that his stolen presidency was going to end in disaster and disgrace. And it was an election year, so people were about to start paying attention. So he took a lesson from his dear old Dad: he would unleash the hired help to unload a relentless fusillade of lies against his opponent.

Lying was an important part of the strategy because he was up against a strong challenger. John Kerry of Massachusetts was one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate; he was also a tall, fit, well-educated, impeccably diplomatic, Irish Catholic patrician who didn’t challenge anyone’s idea of what a president looked like. He talked like Barack Obama and looked like Mitt Romney. He was allowed to get pneumonia without anyone losing their goddamn minds, that’s how white and manly he was.

Most critically, though, he seemed to have almost unique standing to campaign against the Bush administration’s spectacular failure in Iraq. At the time, Republicans had – cynically, but effectively – made themselves synonymous with The Troops. Anyone who questioned their lies or challenged their reckless foreign policy was axiomatically discredited as “hating the troops.” Kerry, however, was A Troop, with a track record of telling the hard truth about an unjustified war. He had earned five medals in Vietnam and then used that moral authority to call for an end to the bloodshed. His service gave him a way to connect to a massive group of voters for whom the war had been a generational trauma – and it was a strong contrast to Bush, who had used his wealth and family connections to dodge the draft.

Enter the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This was a group of Vietnam veterans who, in mid-2004, collectively realized that Kerry had lied about his heroism, hoodwinked the military into giving him an award, not once but five times, and successfully covered up his perfidy for thirty-odd years, despite having been scrutinized by Massachusetts voters and press in half a dozen statewide elections. This fantastical tale was largely spun by Jerome Corsi, now known for spreading birtherism (the racist conspiracy theory that former President Obama was not an American citizen), narrowly escaping prosecution by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and, most recently, hawking Trump’s favorite quack coronavirus cure. They were, naturally, bankrolled by obscenely wealthy Bush supporters.

Maybe these Swift boat veterans were purposefully lying; maybe they were sad old men whose trauma was manipulated by right-wing propagandists. But they did what they were supposed to do. Kerry’s campaign lost its footing and never quite got it back. Instead of being able to challenge Bush’s lies about about the war in Iraq that was happening at the time, he was stuck on the defensive against Bush’s lies about the Vietnam war, which had ended decades before. In one retrospectively critical moment of priming the conservative base for Donald “I like the people who weren’t captured” Trump, delegates at the Republican convention wore silly purple heart bandaids to mock the wounds Kerry received in combat.

We know how that ended. Bush won the popular vote by around 2%, which back in the day actually used to be enough to win the election. Thus, ISIS rose and New Orleans drowned.

The thing is, the bad guys don’t actually forget the past as easily as they hope you do. When a play works, they run it again. When a play almost works, they run it again but better. When a play doesn’t immediately work, it still rallies the right-wing base and softens up the general public for their authoritarian politics of lies and abuse, so they keep it in their back pocket. So we should probably try to understand the specific elements that made the Swift boat propaganda campaign particularly effective.

Imagine you’re an amoral Republican candidate and I’m your mercenary sociopath of a campaign manager. I’ve just said, “look, you’re getting your ass kicked, we’re going to have to swiftboat your opponent” and you’re like “what’s a swiftboat? Write me a memo!” So, here it is. (You may be thinking “but you don’t know anything about me, and I’d never be a Republican candidate for anything!” Lesson the first: it doesn’t matter, because your swiftboat attack has nothing to do with you.) 

A swiftboat attack is bullshit. We like to think the truth is the most effective political weapon, but what if there really aren’t any disqualifying skeletons in your opponent’s closet? If you’re going to sabotage them anyway, that’s kind of liberating. After all, true stories depend on facts, which can be too boring to stick with people, and don’t have made-to-spec story arcs that conveniently fit with your campaign’s themes. Plus, if you’re relying on some actual truth that exists in the universe, you’re running the risk that there’s some mitigating factor out there, some witness who can give different context or a wronged party who can say they’ve buried the hatchet. Worse, your opponent already knows about stuff they actually did. Campaigns do a ton of background research into their own candidates, specifically so that they’re prepared for a predictable attack. They can’t prepare themselves for literally anything your army of political strategists can imagine, so you will always have the element of surprise.

Swiftboating isn’t an attack on your opponent’s policy. It’s an accusation that they’ve violated some taboo. There’s some sticky detail that people won’t quite be able to forget, even if they are exposed to the eventual debunking. The story, whatever it is, should be most upsetting to a large, important block of voters who are inclined to support your opponent.

The allegations don’t come from you, your campaign, or even a sympathetic journalist. They’re laundered through apparent private citizens who are part of a group of people that the general public tends to find sympathetic. This makes your story seem more credible to at first glance, wrong-foots anyone who wants to defend your opponent against the allegations, and lets you get credit for insincerely denouncing the attack while continuing to benefit from it.

This is a dick-swinging exercise, so be shameless. You’re not just putting your opponent in their place by showing you can get away with lying about them, and maddeningly rejecting responsibility for your lies. You’re showing off an authoritarian contempt for truth itself.

You need a relentless multimedia assault, impossible for people to miss. You might have to bully legitimate media into teaching the controversy, but they’re wimps. You’re not trying to convince most people that this specific story is true, you’re just trying to plant some seeds of doubt, and to sap time and enthusiasm from your opponent and their supporters. Make the election as miserable as possible and voters will reward you for it.

The most important thing is that you want your swiftboat attack to be on some area where you have a real liability and your opponent has a real strength. You want them to have to defend themselves on something they should get to use as a selling point. Even better, you neutralize a totally fair criticism of yourself – no matter how accurate they are or how ridiculous you sound, the press will dismiss it as “both sides point fingers.”

Kerry’s campaign gets used as some kind of object lesson about the futility of primary voters trying to pick a candidate they think will win: “Kerry was supposed to be electable and Kerry lost, so there.” (You’ve probably heard the even stupider cover version, “if Hillary was so electable, why’d she let herself get targeted by all those criminal conspiracies, HMMMM?”) This is 20/20 hindsight spiked with the just world fallacy. John Kerry seemed like a good candidate because he was, in fact, a good candidate, which is why he did significantly better expected, and he came pretty close to beating the odds. If there’s a lesson here, maybe it’s that swiftboating can keep a clearly electable candidate from being elected.

That’s a real buzzkill because it means we can’t treat the primaries like a round of playoffs where we root for the most exciting player and then kick back to watch the finals. But what it lacks in self-gratification, it makes up for with agency. If a swiftboat attack is supposed to affect how people respond to a candidate, then people get to choose whether or not we play along.

Trump, a textbook narcissist who instinctively projects his infinite failings onto others, is almost a swiftboating savant. His campaign is being handled by the professional Republican operatives behind the original Swift Boat campaign. (Literally, some of the same guys.) So as we move into the general election, know that this is in their bag of tricks. If you start to hear alarming stories about presumptive Democratic nominee former Vice President Biden or any other prominent Democrats on the ballot …. give it the smell test, is all I’m saying.

[gothicvalentine]

Let's talk about Walz and what the only source that matters says....

Here is the timeline of Walz’s service. Don’t allow the Republicans to swiftboat Walz like they did presidential candidate John Kerry. 

BTW, important info: the man behind the Walz lies is the man behind John Kerry’s swiftboat lies attack that cost him the election.

[democracyunderground]

Harlan Crow helped fund Swiftboating. Trump campaign continues that legacy in Walz attack

The year was 2004. U.S. Senator John Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee running to unseat President George W. Bush. The Iraq War

"The year was 2004. U.S. Senator John Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee running to unseat President George W. Bush. The Iraq War was a major campaign issue and Sen. Kerry campaigned against it by accurately attacking his Republican opponent.

"Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn't make it so. Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn't make it so. And proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn't make it so," Kerry declared upon accepting the Democratic nomination.

Backed by GOP donors, veterans – some with grievances against Kerry – formed a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), falsely attacking Kerry's Vietnam War record. It was a massively-funded multi-million dollar machine that helped President Bush win re-election by destroying Senator Kerry's military record, and the term "swiftboating" – an organized political and personal smear campaign leveling false accusations – came into being as a result.

It's first ad was released on August 4 or 5, 2004 – almost 20 years to the day when the Trump campaign began its attack on Governor Walz.

On August 31, 2020 Politico ran an exclusive report: "Swift Boat mastermind to launch massive super PAC to boost Trump."

"The new organization, Preserve America, is poised to begin a $30 million advertising blitz," Politico detailed, adding that it "will be overseen by Chris LaCivita, a veteran Republican strategist who orchestrated the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth takedown of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race."

Today, Chris LaCivita is the top advisor to Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

On Thursday, amid the swiftboating of newly-minted Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, The New Yorker's award-winning Jane Mayer wrote: "Remember when John Kerry was Swiftboated by Chris LaCivita who is doing it to Tim Walz now? Guess who funded it? Harlan Crow, the billionaire who has been lavishing freebies on Clarence Thomas."

Back in 2004, that massively-funded multi-million dollar machine, or "millions of dollars in shadowy contributions," as New York Magazine explains it, spent $22,565,360, according to Open Secrets. (That's about $34 million in current U.S. dollars.)

One of Swift Boat's top donors was conservative GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire whose financial relationship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been the subject of numerous bombshell investigative reports. Recently, Senate Democratic Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden detailed some pf Crow's alleged gifts to Justice Thomas. Legal experts have called for Justice Thomas's resignation, and some legal experts have called for the U.S.. Dept. of Justice to open an investigation into Thomas.

(Crow's funding of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was made via his privately-held company, Crow Holdings. According to Open Secrets, Crow has made 1193 donations to candidates, PACs, and political parties since 1989.)

Last year, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported, "One of Crow’s first forays into large donations was by providing some of the initial financing of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an organization that spent millions running attack ads in 2004 against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and was later fined nearly $300,000 by the Federal Election Commission for failing to register as a political committee."

"Even as the Supreme Court was deliberating Citizens United," CREW continued, "Crow reportedly provided the major funding for Liberty Central, another dark money group, this one with links to Justice Thomas."

Citizens United was the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case that – in a 5-4 decision – declared, effectively, money is speech, opening the floodgates to dark money groups that have poured untold billions of dollars into U.S. politics.

"Liberty Central was a 501(c)(4) organization founded by [Justice Thomas's spouse] Ginni Thomas in late 2009 that counted Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo as a board member," CREW's report states. "Ms. Thomas served as president through November 2010 and was paid a salary of more than $120,000. According to Politico, of the $550,000 in anonymous start-up funds the group received in 2009, $500,000 came from Crow, who also held an event for the group at his Dallas home a few months after it launched."

"In helping bankroll the Republican network of dark money groups following Citizens United, Crow has taken full advantage of the diminishing transparency laws around our politics—which Justice Thomas has been instrumental in dismantling," CREW concluded.

In 2007, Newsweek published a deeply sourced, 7000-word report on what went on behind the scenes in the Kerry campaign and how it failed to adequately respond to the swiftboating. Essentially, the report suggests, the campaign reacted too slowly, tried too hard to play nice, and did not immediately attack with full force."

[steve-pift]

[gwydionmisha]