Dirty Tricks and Swift Boats - The History of "Rat Fucking"

Back before the Watergate break-in, Republican operatives had a name for their unique brand of below-the-belt campaign attacks: "rat fucking." Part character assassination, part collegiate pranks, the dirty tricks -- conducted in utmost secrecy -- were designed to throw Democrats off balance, create confusion, and tarnish reputations. Three decades later these attacks have been perfected. Except now they're practiced out in the open for everyone, including the compliant media, to witness.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth became the latest multimedia incarnation. Launching the most bitter, and perhaps most deliberately misleading Republican-backed campaign attack since the racist Willie Horton ad of 1988, the group, bankrolled by a wealthy Bush donor, aired hollow, secondhand allegations that John Kerry lied about his actions in Vietnam that won five military medals. Not one charge about Kerry's medals has withstood the slightest scrutiny, but thanks to the inaction of the national press corps, which again appeared in awe of the mighty Republican attack machine and its conservative media echo chamber, the Swift Boat's dirty trick succeeded in disrupting the presidential campaign for several weeks this summer.

Frustration also simmers around the press, and the double standard it seems to have adopted toward the candidates. "Bush has run the most issueless, negative campaign in modern politics," notes Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network. "Yet nothing is written about the fact that a sitting president is offering no agenda for his second term. He should be getting fucking skewered in the press for the kind of campaign he's running, but there's nothing. Republicans are held to a different standard."

Nowhere has that that double standard been more apparent than when contrasting the way the media have covered the two parties' conventions. Compare the coverage of Bush's colossal blunder on Monday -- telling NBC's Matt Lauer that he didn't think the war on terror was winnable -- with Teresa Heinz Kerry's trivial "shove it" remark during the Democratic Convention in Boston last month. So far, Bush's gaffe has garnered far less coverage than Heinz Kerry's.

"Cable TV is like the creature in 'The Predator,'" says the Los Angeles Times' Ronald Brownstein. "It's drawn to heat and conflict. It looks for things with the most edge to it."

"It used to be we as the press would adjudicate the facts of the battle," says Scott Shepherd, a political correspondent for the Cox newspaper chain who is covering his fifth presidential election. "We don't do that anymore. Now we present attacks. That's troublesome to me. We've gotten the idea if we say something is 'fact,' then somehow we're biased," he says, referring to the constant charge on the part of conservatives that the press shows a liberal bias. "The attacks have worked. People are intimidated."
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