JABbering Stooge

Your “librul” media at work.

WASHINGTON - If there was one lesson of the 2004 election cycle, it was respond to attacks quickly and directly. In the summer of 2004, John Kerry let a slowly building media campaign against his Vietnam War experience explode into a debacle. From that campaign a new phrase entered the political lexicon: “swift boating.” Now it appears that Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani may have his own “swift boaters.”

If I may channel Nedra Pickler for a bit, MSRNC does not explain that the term “swiftboating” has a very specific definition:

Swiftboating is American political jargon for an ad hominem attack usually resulting in a benefit to an established political force.

This form of attack is controversial, easily repeatable, and difficult to verify or disprove because it is generally based on personal feelings or recollections. It frequently refers to a campaign that uses viral marketing techniques to sell the allegations. By using credible-sounding sources to make sensational and difficult-to-disprove accusations against an opponent, the campaign leverages media tendencies to focus on a controversial story.

Here’s the ad that MSRNC disingenuously calls “Swiftboating”:

First, note that the specific claims, that a) Giuliani - through incompetence or deliberate malfeasance - failed to provide the firefighters with working radios, leading to the unnecessary deaths of 121 firefighters; that b) Giuliani callously rushed the cleanup operations on The Pile for ostensibly economic reasons; and c) that Giuliani foolishly put the Emergency Operations Command Center inside WTC 7 even though the WTC complex had been hit by terrorists a mere eight years before and was a likely target for future attacks, are all foucsed on specific Giuliani policies, not ad hominem attacks on Giuliani. Compare that to the Smear Boat Liars for Bush, whose ad buys were nothing but 30 seconds worth of “Kerry is a treasonous, self-important commie poopyhead who shot himself in the ass to inflate his war record.”

The second criterion for an ad to be considered “swiftboating” is that it must be either difficult to verify the truth of the claims made, or be demonstrably false. In the case of the IAFF, the claims they make are very easily verifiable:

• Problem of faulty radios not solved? Check.

• Removal of remains and debris unduly hastened, resulting in human remains being used to fill potholes later on? Check.

• Emergency operations center placed in terrorist target on Giuliani’s orders? Check.

The swifties claims? Not so much. Given these two factors, to call the IAFF’s video campaign “swiftboating,” as MSRNC does, is not only flat out dishonest, it utterly nullifies the meaning of the word, in much the same was that too many fire drills in a short period of time is ultimately counterproductive.

So there you have it, folks. Your “librul” media - still posessed by the Demon named False Equivalency.