In 2004, after losing the post-9/11 2002 mid-terms, the Democrats fielded a decorated Vietnam veteran against an incumbent president who was revealed to have gone AWOL on his National Guard service, a service in itself that was a bypass of the regular draft.

Instead of accepting the stacked deck, conservative Republicans immediately went to work reframing - parading a group of veterans to call into doubt Kerry's service, while finding a magic unicorn forged document to derail the otherwise overwhelmingly compelling evidence that Bush had failed to complete.

Strangely enough, the National Guard story and forgery cost one of our broadcast icons, Dan Rather, his career - yet rather than take that as an affront to their profession, the media seems to have taken it as a warning not to get involved in authoritative fact-checking - only to post what the candidates say happened and leave it to viewers to decide. That in itself is abrogation of duty, but the irony seems lost on the pampered 4th Estate.

Swift Boating isn't new. Karl Rove, its prime architect, had made a career of it as an acolyte of Lee Atwater: - in Texas and then in Alabama, and then of course nationally. An example from the Atlantic:

"People vote in Alabama for two reasons," [Mark] Kennedy told me. "Anger and fear. It's a state that votes against somebody rather than for them. Rove understood how to put his finger right on the trigger point." Kennedy seemed most bothered by the personal nature of the attacks, which, in addition to the usual anti-trial-lawyer litany, had included charges that he was mingling campaign funds with those of a nonprofit children's foundation he was involved with. In the end he eked out a victory by less than one percentage point.

Kennedy leaned forward and said, "After the race my wife, Peggy, was at the supermarket checkout line. She picked up a copy of Reader's Digest and nearly collapsed on her watermelon. She called me and said, 'Sit down. You're not going to believe this.'" Her husband was featured in an article on "America's worst judges." Kennedy attributed this to Rove's attacks.

When his term on the court ended, he chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove's signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

Ah yes, the "corrupt foundation" and turning a supposed advantage into an albatross around the candidate's neck - where have we heard that one? And Rove spread the rumor that Ann Richards's staff was dominated by lesbians and "appointing avowed homosexual activists to state jobs" - and whispers about Hillary and Huma abound, for those who care.

In 2015, Gallup showed Hillary chosen by Americans as the Most Admired Woman anywhere for the 20th time. In May 2014, over 2 years ago, Karl Rove jump started the "Hillary's got brain damage" meme in advance of the coming campaign (leaving Chris Cilizza of WaPo to fill in the innuendo), and now being put to good use by the Trump campaign. Two and a half years later, the continued media-fed meme about Hillary is her lack of likability - even compared to Trump?

But this is little different from the concerted effort to take down every facet of Gore's accomplishments in 1999-2000. Gore's Tennessee childhood and work on the Nashville Tennessean newspaper became "an establishment insider who lived at the Ritz in Washington". His work on expanding the internet from its DARPA beginnings"in what he labeled "Internet 2.0" became "he said he invented the internet". Even an off-the-cuff remark about his roommate Erich Segal became a mocking joke about he & Tipper being the role models for "Love Story" when in fact the male character was a composite of Gore and Tommy Lee Jones.

From there, the trivial damage would take its toll. Gore's active work on toxic dumps got flipped into a "he invented Love Canal too". His prescient serious work on global warming turned into a big joke, as did his crucial role in the most successful administration in growing jobs and reducing poverty. From the Bridge to the 21st Century, Gore's success was trivialized into being the same as the "outsider" Bush but less fun and more robotic. Bush even bought a ranch to give him that Reaganesque authenticity, unlike Gore who'd only been partly raised on one.

Just as Gore was declared terminally insincere by both Rove whisper/fax campaigns and the press itself, so had been Hillary by no less than WIlliam Safire - the famous "congenital liar" condemnation that sadly never resulted in all the "lock her up" convictions that Safire predicted. There's no factoring in the number of lies and logical somersaults the press goes to maintain these memes - as Digby notes, "they hear what they want to hear".:

When Robin Roberts asked President Obama for debating advice for Hillary Clinton, this is what he said:

"Be yourself and explain what motivates you. I’ve gotten to know Hillary and seen her work, seen her in tough times and in good times. She’s in this for the right reasons. There’s a reason why we haven’t had a woman president before, so she’s having to break down some barriers. There’s a level of mistrust and a caricature of her that just doesn’t jive with who I know -- this person who cares deeply about kids."

CNN's Gloria Borger characterized his comments this way:

He wants her to try to be more like herself because she has a hard time doing that. 

I don't think that's what he was saying. In fact, he was saying something else altogether. But they've got a narrative and they're sticking to it.

Yes, they will rewrite anything to fit their storyline, and the amount of effort translates directly into the candidate's "inauthenticity", not simply lies and poor discernment on the side of reporters.

Sadly, it's not just the conservatives who go in for this kind of game. Gore had most of his trials at the hands of liberals for Bradley. During this year's primary with Bernie Sanders, Hillary was labeled "anti-gay" for being late to support gay marriage vs. civil unions - something very few gays even got behind before 2000 - while her opponent was falsely portrayed as being its champion for decades. Not a huge deal in and of itself, but it served to mask Hillary's recognizing gay partner benefits in the State Department before the rest of the Obama Administration's following suit, as well as her openly good relations with LGBT groups and causes going back decades.

Similarly, in most elections liberal candidates seek out endorsements from Unions, which invariably means courting the leadership which consults its membership to some degree. This season, after Hillary had lined up 90% of the major union endorsements, the equation got flipped - Union endorsements were actually corrupt, the leaders were out of touch with their members, and with a few sparse anecdotes, it became that Bernie had the hearts-and-minds of the rank-and-file. (Oddly enough, the head of Sanders-supporting NNU didn't publish the results of their member poll, which oddly contained a list of very non-health related criteria for support). Again, in an of itself not a huge deal, par for elections, but considering the history of Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel being openly dismissive of unions and Obama's unwillingness to get involved in Wisconsin's union-breaking efforts, Unions lost an opportunity to be front-and-center with an eventually winning candidate who openly supported their causes.

As the Atlantic article notes, Rove's success wasn't always that people believed his whispers - sometimes it was simply effective in getting people to resign and go away - to just give up, which is success on its own, and even better if their departure is seen as taint. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (appointed by Obama) is widely seen as a poor and abrasive DNC chief, but the supposed revelations of the email hacks were nothing much new, and her resignation was much more about putting aside her distractions than validating anything. Yet this episode is fairly widely seen as affirming that something sordid went on. Please compare these DNC atrocities such as a Jewish atheist smear that wasn't accepted and someone saying they didn't like Bernie or not scheduling enough debates that were then schedule, with standard-fare Rove tactics like gay baiting and mob attacks that effectively worked. Still, for many millennials who are now ironically going for the libertarian often anti-progressive Gary Johnson, the DNC activity has become a prime factor in their inability to hold their nose and vote Hillary.

Even the celebration of having a truly competitive female candidate gets diluted and soured with typically dismissive lingo ("a woman, just not that woman" - contrast that with a distasteful equivalent of "a black, just not that black" for Obama). For someone with her lifelong left-leaning political and charitable record whose idea of a harsh insult is calling them "deplorable", while her opponent talks about women as fat pigs bleeding out of "somewhere" and openly admires his daughter's tits, the purported character equivalence is mindboggling.

Who's actually behind the successful conflation of "she scheduled a meeting with an important constituent/well-connected individual" vs. Trump's documented illegal influence mongering and cheating both customers and partners and dishonestly/illegally taking hundreds of millions in undeserved tax breaks. Hillary's many speeches ranging from free to $360K - including a few to energy groups and lawyers and many more to liberal advocacy & issues groups - become the same as Trump University where he bilked students out of money and never even showed up?

Well, the Washington Post helped kick it off in its story last summer combining Bill & Hillary's lifelong campaign and charity efforts - something like putting Hewlett-Packard's revenue sheet on Carly Fiorina's record or mashing up John Kerry's wife's trust with his own income - something the Post would never do. And it continued with the primary campaign's continued harping on the Clinton Foundation, including the prime bullet of failures in Haiti (like there's ever been a success in Haiti) that segued well into the current campaign.

Of course Swift Boating didn't stop after John Kerry. The whole birther thing is classic - take a unique feel-good tale, mixed-race child of an immigrant who has ties with the third world and first, and turn it into a scare-mongering screed contrived to combine race, the wrong religion, anti-immigrant sentiment, and wrong side of the 100 year old struggle to differentiate social programs & compassion vs. communism.

The reason why Swift Boating worked and it keeps working is because it's designed to go to the gut, to service the visceral emotions while tickling the perverse opposite of reality, and no amount of logic or documentation or other refutation can ever do way with that suspicion. Each bit of negative news or speculation is added to the heap; each bit of happy news or extenuating or disproving evidence is ignored and discarded. And the rise of the internet as our major news source makes it as easy to create and disseminate new "facts" and opinion as it is to wall ourselves off from evidence we don't want to see. And in open sites, we see even the happiest feel-good story followed by the usual suspects, the plethora of comments immediately jumping to the "liar", "crook", "establishment", "dynasty" and other labels that have come to define this effort, whatever the actual story was about.

In the year of the hack, we know that Colin Powell had his emails hacked and released, as did the DNC, the Panama Papers were released, State Department earlier had a hack attack. But the only email server we're worried about is Hillary's, which some speculate may have been hacked, but for some reason no emails have been released (except those leaked and later bulk-dumped by the FBI). Swift Boating is the triumph of appearances over facts and reality. Spurred on by the apparent post-Watergate truism of "it's not the crime, it's the coverup", we've gone balls-out loony over trying (in a partisan kind of way) to discern every hidden agenda and undivulged secret, and simply ignore bonkers policies, horrid actions, outrageous statements, and the once normal metrics of what's both scandalous and prosecutable.

Somewhat like Helen of Troy, Hillary has launched a thousand swift boats, splayed across the sea. And somewhat akin, much of the ensuing uproar and fighting doesn't appear to be about her at all - it's just the kind of thing boys do when bored or in a vindictive mood - whether in war or politics or fantasy football or a press deadline looming - but the results in November could be just as tragic.

==

From Time:

Every year for more than two decades, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed scores of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents from the federal government, many in pursuit of a favorite target: Bill and Hillary Clinton....

From 2009 to 2013 when Clinton was Secretary of State, the number of FOIA requests averaged around 18,500 a year, up from less than 6,000 in the years before she took office, while the number of full time staffers handling them stayed steady between 130 and 150. “We were working under outrageous conditions,” says one former official responsible for the process. Staffers burned out in under two years because “Their job was a nightmare,” the official says. Since the revelation of Clinton’s unusual server arrangement the number of FOIA requests has spiked again to more than 22,000.

American politics didn’t always operate this way. In the 1980 Supreme Court case that exonerated Kissinger for taking work records out of the State department, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “it would be unseemly” to take sworn testimony from agency officials about their “subjective motivation” for not complying with FOIA or the Federal Records Act as they struggled with “the flood of paper that threatens to engulf today’s bureaucracy.” That kind of reasoning seems quaint 36 years later.