How does it feel to get swiftboated? --from dKos

Hi, it's been a little while since I last crawled out from under my rock :hi: , but I found this little tidbit of insight about what may have been going on inside JK's head during a... well, let's just call it a particularly trying time of his life.
Emphases are mine:

"Swiftboating" is different in that (1) the person is attacked in an area of strong emotional import and (2) the person is attacked by a group of people with whom he has identified, displayed deep and abiding concern for, and has experienced years of genuine and validated emotional attachment.
Kerry is obviously proud of his service, of his speeches to end the Vietnam war, proud of his work for improved veterans' benefits. I saw on his face a genuine love and deep concern for his comrades-in-arms, so much so that he could not bring himself to respond in kind to those few who opposed him. Just my analysis, but it looked like he was wounded emotionally by his fellow veterans' attacks and then his personal ethics would not allow him to return fire.

One of the best-selling recently books talks in detail about the power of shock. The paralysis felt after a blitzkrieg of lies, unrelenting repetition, and emotional appeals... by someone, or some group, you have always loved and trusted.

Swiftboating, therefore, involves something a bit more profound than suffering damage to your reputation. It's being put into a position where you doubt every choice your ever made, especially the positive ones, because the attacks have taken and poisoned something beloved to you.

(From the thread here. It's mainly about Hillary, except for the JK reference)

I have wondered about this myself over the years. Most of the players in the SBVT were GOP operatives, GOP donors or old Nixon hacks. That was not the problem. The problem was the very few guys who got involved on TV who really were there (but not on his boat for any of the medals) yet felt compelled to turn on Kerry and outright lie (those who signed on but did not participate -- well, I am not sure if they knew the nature of where the group was headed) -- at a very human level, that was very hurtful, especially with everything they all went through in Vietnam. I read Tour of Duty, and some of those guys pop up in the book, and were not hostile to Kerry when interviewed in 2002. In fact, they all got together in Norfolk, VA in 2002 for a Swift Boat gathering -- no problems whatsoever reported in the book.

I think this is something nobody has mentioned anywhere. It's always been about "kerry didn't fight back" (untrue) with a compelling reason being the lack of money due to his general election campaign being 5 weeks longer than Bush's. That's probably the biggest reason, but I still think the comment you bring up is interesting. Not sure we'll never know if the commenter has a point, or is completely off base.

There was a huge gap in the comments of some future SBVT in Tour of Duty and in the SBVT campaign. Tour of Duty was by far a better researched, consistent account. The problem was that you had to take the time to actually spend several hours reading it. The SBVT book was made up of disjointed, unconnected charges - that often contradicted each other, but if you just opened it in Borders or Barnes and Nobles - on any page what you found was a damning charge by someone claiming to have interacted with Kerry.

An ad with a bullet point list of Then: and Now: comments would have exposed many as liars. But, it could have backfired as well. As it was the RW was accusing Kerry and "his" people of bullying people like Gardner. Even on the Democratic side there were some questioning the argument that hundreds of people were lying. I always thought that the use of affidavits written by people with no power was part of why it was deadly. To counter it those are the people that the powerful Senator would have had to attack. It also would have transformed the hopeful positive message of the campaign to a free for all between Kerry and his guys and the liars. (Not to mention we did NOT have the echo chamber and this would have fed it.)

Even attacking the people in his line of command, who betrayed him, which would have been less asymmetrical could be spun as attacking the military. From Tour of Duty alone, Kerry had plenty to use against those people. They were the ones who set the policy that got people killed, accomplished little and in some cases (think Kerrey, who also had Hoffman as a superior) lead to actions that were wrong. There was a WP article posted here in the past that said that the reason Hoffman got involved was because he felt that Tour of Duty was likely to forever define his reputation. (That Kerry was not the source of the most negative comments was not important.) Even if we were not in a war and Abu Ghraib was not an issue, it is hard to imagine how fighting to prove that the US did things that were wrong in Vietnam could win enough people. Not to mention for the people who cared about that, he had spoken out on this when it mattered.

The problem Kerry faced was that many people, at least initially, could not believe that hundreds of unconnected nobodies would get together and make up lies. Even without something like the Patriot Group, they managed to show the connections to Bush's funders - and that they shared a lawyer - pretty quickly.

The op does explain how deeply this likely hurt Kerry - not because of the RW operatives but because of the the soldiers pulled in. It also makes a November 2006 attack that much more power hungry and despicable - "inappropriate" can not refer to misspeaking - and she knows him well enough to know better.