Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

People are complicated. Love is not.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: ‘Swiftboating’ Ad Creator Is Dead

Open Thread: ‘Swiftboating’ Ad Creator Is Dead

by | 117 Comments

This post is in: ,

Quite the record, per Stripes:

… A longtime partner at the political ad firm Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, Reed worked on campaigns for numerous Republican candidates, including senators George Allen and John Warner of Virginia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois. He also made ads for John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000 and served as a senior media adviser to Donald Trump in 2016, after launching his own consulting company in Alexandria. By then, he was being hailed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson as “the smartest political consultant I know.”

“Rick was an exceptional talent and a gifted ad maker,” Fitzgerald said in a statement shared by Reed’s family. “In my case, he took a very young, virtual neophyte, and vaulted him into a U.S. Senate seat. His dry wit and contagious sense of humor made campaigning fun, and his clients loved him.”

Reed remained best known for his work with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of about 200 former Navy officers and enlisted sailors who alleged that Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts and Democratic presidential nominee, had embellished his record during the Vietnam War, when he captained Swift boats in the Mekong Delta and was awarded honors including the Silver Star. Among other claims, they asserted that Kerry received his first of three Purple Hearts for a minor, self-inflicted wound, and said that he was unfit to serve as commander in chief because of his antiwar activism after returning from Vietnam.

Their claims were fiercely disputed by the Kerry campaign and later undermined by news reports, which revealed that some of the men criticizing the senator had previously filed written reports lauding his heroism. Many of the veterans who spoke in the commercials did not serve on the same Swift boats as Kerry, and other veterans questioned the accounts of some who said they did.

Kerry allies considered the commercials a smear campaign, and noted that they benefited a candidate – incumbent President George W. Bush – who had never served in combat. The ads were also criticized by some Republicans, including McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who called them “dishonest and dishonorable.” (He still maintained ties with Reed, whose firm briefly worked on McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.) “Swiftboating” entered the political lexicon as a term for unfair attack ads…

In the early 1990s, Reed teamed up with his friend and mentor Greg Stevens, who was perhaps best known for crafting an attack ad that featured Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank. The two men worked together until Stevens’s death in 2007. Two years later, Reed launched his own firm, Rick Reed Media, making issue advocacy ads in addition to working on political campaigns…

He left; the world’s a better place…

Reader Interactions

117Comments

  4. 4.

    OzarkHillbilly

    We can comfort ourselves with the idea that if there is a just god, and if there is a hell, that’s where he is.

  5. 5.

    Alison Rose 💙🌻💛

    It really was a despicable moment in political history. I remember those assholes who put little bandages on their faces with purple hearts drawn on them. Meanwhile I saw a documentary about Kerry’s service and his activism after the war, and it gave me a deep sense of respect for him. He would have been a good president.

  7. 7.

    MomSense

    It was shameful the way the GOP treated Kerry.  The same a$$holes behind this mess were shocked by “Trumpism”.  Bullshit.  They cultivated the stupidity, cruelty and dishonesty for decades.

    I’ll never forget and NEVER forgive.

  8. 8.

    waspuppet

    Their claims were fiercely disputed by the Kerry campaign and later undermined by news reports, which revealed that some of the men criticizing the senator had previously filed written reports lauding his heroism. Many of the veterans who spoke in the commercials did not serve on the same Swift boats as Kerry, and other veterans questioned the accounts of some who said they did.

    IN OTHER WORDS IT WAS ALL LIES. THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT YOU ARE SAYING. SAY IT. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE.

  14. 14.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    a couple of days ago Reasonable Republican/anti-anti-trump twitter was doing another circle jerk about how trump happened because Democrats made fun of Our Willard and Binders Full of Women

  15. 15.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Baud: More like Trump is more of the same, just louder. This is just all the chickenhawks trying to drown out the voices in their head telling them they are cowards.

  16. 16.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Mike in NC:

    I’ll never forget the idiots at the GOP convention and their insulting Purple Heart band-aids

    The Romney kvetching had me thinking about Pat Peale.

    @Ladyraxterinok:  If Kerry had been elected wouldn’t there have been a problem later when that information came out about John Edwards?

    he could have been sent to live on a farm upstate and replaced with that up and coming Obama fella from Illinois

  20. 20.

    Alison Rose 💙🌻💛

    @Ladyraxterinok: I don’t recall if there was any evidence Kerry knew about what a secret shit Edwards was. If it had come out after the election, Edwards could’ve resigned, no? I don’t know what the protocols would be for that sort of thing with the VP. But it’s not like Kerry had been driving Edwards to his sex meetings.

  21. 21.

    dexwood

    My mother always said if you can’t say something good about someone, say what you feel about them. Fuck that guy.

  22. 22.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Mike in NC: As my ex BIL said, the NG in National Guard stood for “Not Going”. Which his very politically connected mother made sure of. Not that I blame her, just pointing out, as my ex BIL did, that there were those who were lucky, and those who were fucked.

  24. 24.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Mike in NC: Dubya was a deserter from the National Guard, which he joined to avoid being drafted.  He failed to show up on weekends in Alabama, and didn’t even bother to report in when he transferred to Massachusetts where he attended the Harvard MBA program.

  27. 27.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Speaking about 2004, I personally thought at the time it was disaster for the GOP how they got GW re-elected, since all this bullshit with Trump was there and growing inside the Republican Party (like the whole cult of personality around GW Bush and that “greatest president ever” nonsense) That if the Republican got their butts kicked a couple of cycles it would force them get their crazys under control. Instead it started this death spiral of Purity Tests were  the GOP is now at Dick Cheny is considered a ultra woke Libertard.

  31. 31.

    Scout211

    Mr. Scout and I took a ride on the PCF 816 Swift Boat  at the San Diego Maritime Museum a few years ago. There was nothing but honor and praise for those who served on swift boats during that tour and ride.  Mr. Scout was on a mine sweeper during the Vietnam Nam war and has nothing but respect for the other small Navy ships in that war.

    Is it wrong to be happy that Reed has died? Asking for a friend . . .

  36. 36.

    cain

    @Baud:

    right wingers always politicized the soldiers. We can’t speak badly of them at any time unless they happen to be a Democrat and then it’s open season. Swift boating indeed.

  37. 37.

    Scout211

    @Baud:The best way to honor his memory is to lie about feeling sad that he’s gone.

    I hope you have been writing down all your truly amazing comments (like this one) over the years you have been gifting us with your wry humor.

    You could put them all in a book entitled something like, “The world according to Baud.”  I would buy the book.  But not if you used Regnery Publishing.  Hard no on that one. 😂

  38. 38.

    different-church-lady

    @Baud: ​

    The best way to honor his memory is to lie about feeling sad that he’s gone don’t.​

  43. 43.

    Honus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    “I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death.” -Nero Wolfe The Black Mountain

  44. 44.

    Nelle

    I suppose I owe our leaving the country, then, to this failure of a human being.  My husband served on gunboats on the upper Mekong, along the Cambodian border.  He was so outraged by the attacks on Kerry that he (my husband) volunteered for the campaign and was sent across three or four states to speak at rallies as a Vietnam vet (he did three tours) for Kerry.  The Swift-boating attacks hit my husband in a gut and he wanted out after Kerry lost.  Then after Bush won, clients began cancelling contracts with his consulting business, saying that Bush-Cheney wouldn’t be enforcing environmental laws (Hydrogeology, water quality, and super-fund sites).

    Living in New Zealand is nothing to complain about.  Much happier there than here.  But I missed a lot of the lives of our young adult children, who were here, during those years.

  45. 45.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Honus: I think you may have misread my intentions with that comment.  I had nothing good to say.  So I said nothing.

  46. 46.

    eachother

    Said it then. Say it now. Kerry was too timid. Too nice. He is a war hero. Earned his mettle with lead. Dog damn the cowards that sat on their thumbs and stuck it up their crass. (Intended crass). Kerry’s heroism was so extreme it is hard to imagine doing what he did. His fellows confirm his honors were earned.
    republicans suck. 99.999% of them.

  48. 48.

    Joe Falco

    A longtime partner at the political ad firm Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, Reed worked on campaigns for numerous Republican candidates, including senators George Allen and John Warner of Virginia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois. He also made ads for John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000 and served as a senior media adviser to Donald Trump in 2016, after launching his own consulting company in Alexandria. By then, he was being hailed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson as “the smartest political consultant I know.”

    “You shall know them by their fruit”, and what rotten, poisonous fruit they were.

  49. 49.

    HumboldtBlue

    It appears RNC has told Trump to pound sand, they have refused to pay for lawyers for the DOJ documents case.

  56. 56.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I got a vague answer that told me nothing:

    We are updating the network.Done now.

    So I have no idea what happened.   On the bright side, the issue – whatever it was – was resolved very quickly.

  59. 59.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: It’s like he’s a child.  Same thing with that “yesterday’s a hard word for me.”  I felt like that was the mot genuine thing I had every seen from T****.

    Both are things a child would say.  Such an odd, awful, creature.

  61. 61.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    Must have been installing the thingamabob.

    I’d appreciate some advance notice, please, before they replace the doohickey and update the whatchamacallit.

  62. 62.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Scout211:

    You could put them all in a book entitled something like, “The world according to Baud.”  I would buy the book.

    I think a Baud/Different Church Lady point counterpoint would be awesome. Intersperse with quips by Betty, Anne and WaterGirl!

  63. 63.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: It kind of reminded me of the bullshit word salad from 365 data centers.  “something something maintenance” which meant nothing. I’m flashing back to The Apocolypse and it’s making me cranky.

  69. 69.

    Anotherlurker

    Say nothing but good of the dead. Rick Reed is dead.  Good!

    I take pleasure that I’m one year older than this low life and I out lived him.

    I hope his passing was slow, painful and oh so undignified.

  70. 70.

    Baud

    @Shalimar:

    True. I should have said “out of power” for more than two cycles.  I think they need to be out of power for at least three and possibly four to reform.

  72. 72.

    Ken

    served as a senior media adviser to Donald Trump in 2016

    Did no one warn the man that everything Trump touches dies?  Though I don’t suppose he qualifies for a Herman Cain award.

  75. 75.

    raven

    Kerry should have fought back immediately. He let them run over him and then tried to catch up. I remember when I was in DC for the 10th Anniversary of the Wall and I went up to him after the ceremony. I said ” Hi, I was here with you at Operation Dewey Canyon 3″ He couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I went to one of his rallies Atlanta when he was running. I wore my nam hat and jungle fatigues and one of his minions said “you come and sit behind him, you look like a veteran”. You know what I said to him.

  77. 77.

    PaulB

    @WaterGirl: Really?  Where are you seeing that?

    Politico is reporting it:

    For Kise’s services, Trump will have to pay on his own. A person familiar with the matter confirmed that the Republican National Committee is not paying for Trump’s legal fees related to the FBI’s investigation and retrieval of documents at Mar-a-Lago.

  79. 79.

    FastEdD

    A Republican colleague of mine didn’t believe it when I told him about the people with Purple Heart bandaids at the RNC. The next day I showed him the photos. He isn’t an R anymore.

  81. 81.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud:

    I should have said “out of power” for more than two cycles. I think they need to be out of power for at least three and possibly four to reform.

    They need to be out of power for as long as they were after Hoover, and even that might not be enough.

  82. 82.

    coin operated

    My dad piloted a landing craft during Inchon and still has an inoperable piece of shrapnel in his head to mark the occasion.  ‘Twas a different boat in a different war, but to say he was pissed about the swift boating campaign would be an understatement.

  84. 84.

    sdhays

    @Ladyraxterinok: The Edwards scandal (that I’m aware of) occurred during his run for President in 2008. So there was nothing to “come out” if he had been elected Vice President in 2004.

    Now, would he have been able to control himself for 8 years? Who knows? But it would have been a different timeline.

  87. 87.

    zhena gogolia

    @Honus: Wow. One of my students wrote a thesis about him. His political history is quite interesting. ETA: I mean Stout, not Wolfe.

  88. 88.

    WaterGirl

    @PaulB: Wow.  They either have decided that Trump’s a loser and they are cutting him loose, or they just don’t have enough money and they plan to spend what they have on November elections.

    Interesting.

  89. 89.

    Roger Moore

    @FastEdD:

    I think this is a good summary of decent Republicans.  They treat being a Republican as an identity as much as a political stance, and they have a hard time believing anyone in their group could be as awful as Republicans actually are.  They’ll continue to ignore the truth until it’s forced through their willingness to disbelieve.  This is why it’s so terrible the media is unwilling to tell it like it is; they’re one of the few groups that could really get through to reachable Republicans.

  91. 91.

    Honus

    @zhena gogolia: Stout invented a grade school banking system and retired at like 40 before he began writing the Wolfe books. It amazes me how consistently good and also timely they are from 1935 to 1975.  He has incisive contemporary references to both J Edgar Hoover in the thirties and on up to Nixon.  Wolfe’s political history is pretty interesting too!

  92. 92.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @zhena gogolia:  I  wish they (A&E) had made more episodes,  Timothy Hutton was perfect as Archie. (Mrs.) Bemused Senior introduced me to the books, a huge source of pleasure.

  95. 95.

    RSA

    When my father died in January at age 94, he left this world with his honor intact like Zumwalt did. Reed did not.

    What a great tribute and a great condemnation. I’m reminded of something I read recently about being a good person, though I’m no doubt butchering the original:

    Try to be someone whom the people you admire would want in their company.

    Of course, that means having good judgment about respectability in the first place.

  97. 97.

    Jeffro

    I’m tempted to say that those Purple Heart band-aids were the last straw for me.  They were a huge deal – I was furious for weeks about it.  But from the Clinton impeachment onwards, it’s pretty much been a non-stop downward spiral from the scum-sucking GQP.  The band-aids were just another sorry step down into the darkness and honestly, they pale in comparison to today’s Republicans, split between openly supporting or quietly enabling a monumentally corrupt, insurrection-inciting president*.

  100. 100.

    lowtechcyclist

    @raven:

    Kerry should have fought back immediately. He let them run over him and then tried to catch up.

    This. I remember waiting, day after day after painful day, as the Swift Boat attacks by the Rethugs went unanswered.  It was like a week or ten days before the Kerry team responded.  And you could just see the polls plummet.

  101. 101.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Jeffro: ​ 

    I still am, I still hold deep hate for that one woman who initiated the idea and was photographed at the convention grinning like the fucking ghoul she was. Always wanted to punch that face.

  102. 102.

    raven

    @lowtechcyclist: To me the real killer was when POW’s came out and said “this is how his testimony to the Fulbright Committee made me feel.” You can argue with a lot of stuff but not that. The pukes have twisted what he said for all these years. Fuck em then and now

     

    It’s funny, when he announced a couple of us who were in DC had some real laughs remembering how he pranced around like he was in charge. The VVAW rank and file were not fond of officers. That said, he had a real place there and we needed a spokesperson with his kind of gravitas.

  103. 103.

    kalakal

    “The evil that men do lives after them”

    The following line is inapplicable to scum like Reed

  105. 105.

    dnfree

    My dad served in the Navy in World War II and was very proud of his service.  He was also a diehard Republican.  He was so alarmed by the Swiftboat claims that he talked about them nonstop, mailed everyone articles, ad infinitum.  In his mind, Kerry was a danger to the country who must be stopped.  We tried, but nothing could convince him otherwise.  (He also believed Nixon was framed by the media.). Looking back now, the Republican attacks on Clinton (both), Obama, and Biden come from a very old playbook.

  106. 106.

    eachother

    @Origuy: Rocks tumbling down 1,000 foot cliffs. Water rising. Thoughts about which side of the raging river you should have been on.  And how high up the cliff to camp. And more rocks yielding their positions. And the drama of the place was already significant before the rain. But your not being scoured in a slot canyon. Accepting you may have to wait a day to cross the river.

  107. 107.

    StringOnAStick

    @HumboldtBlue: That Twitter handle has been the best resource I’ve seen about narcissism and what they do, and why we are always surprised because we aren’t looking deep enough at their deeply abnormal psychological issues.

  108. 108.

    Captain C

    Didn’t one of the swift boat liars later admit that he drove his boat away while Kerry’s was under fire and fighting back?

  109. 109.

    Another Scott

    (repost) Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

    Rove called on an ambitious conservative ad man named Rick Wilson to put together one of the most scurrilous attack ads since Lee Atwater gave Willie Horton his turn at centerstage. The ad opened with pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and the point of the ad was that Max Cleland, who left half his body in a war zone, lacked the gumption to “lead” during the time of terror.

    The veterans in Congress went through the rotunda dome. McCain thundered condemnation. Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican from Nebraska, threatened the Republican National Committee that he’d go to Georgia personally to campaign for Cleland if the ad didn’t come down. John Kerry of Massachusetts kept inveighing against the tactics behind the ad all the way to his own presidential nominating convention in 2004. (Kerry saw the same greasy hands behind that ad as behind the inexcusable Swift Boat attacks on his own war record.) However, by the time Kerry was nominated, Saxby Chambliss had been in the Senate for a year. The ad was the final nail in Cleland’s political coffin. The ad worked.

    But the ad wasn’t through with Max Cleland. It triggered a dormant case of PTSD, and Cleland spun into a deep depression. When he published a memoir in 2009, Cleland gave a long interview to history.net:

    It’s part of my own therapy, my own healing. Those of us who suffer need to talk about it and write about it. I didn’t really have a connection to the suffering of those who have what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder—I call it “post-war stress”—in which you never quite get over what’s happened to you, but you move on. But after I lost the Senate race in 2002, my life collapsed. I went down in every way you can go down. I lost my life as I knew it.

    It took me right back to Vietnam, right back to the battlefield, right back to the wounding. And I had to work through all that stuff. It took me years of counseling and years on medication, and it’s been several years of just writing. I had to make sense of it all.

    It never made any sense. It was destruction for destruction’s sake. In 2016, Rick Wilson gave an interview to Cracked in which he talked about the ad that helped wreck Max Cleland’s career and came very close to ruining his life.

    “The Cleland ad was powerful because it went to his strengths,” Wilson explains. “Everyone assumed Cleland was immune to critiques on national security issues … we found a lot of votes where he’d voted the wrong way … we tested those messages and discovered those messages were very effective against Cleland … they didn’t calculate that I have no moral center when it comes to political ads, and I will destroy the innocent and the guilty …”

    Max Cleland didn’t deserve this, and the fact that it worked proved American politics didn’t deserve Max Cleland. Also, that some sins are mortal and unforgivable. Also, that nothing that happened in the past five years started with Donald Trump. Rest in peace, Max Cleland, and may his memory be a blessing.

    They’re going to keep doing this crap until it stops working. Voters need to defeat the monsters using this trash or it will never end.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  112. 112.

    Ruckus

    @HumboldtBlue:

    I wrote a comment on John’s post about what happens to a narcissist of SFB’s level when their narcissistic ways get the best of them, a little of what it feels like to them. Not a professional level explanation, just things that many of us would never ever like to have to feel, to give a bit of an idea why being a narcissist is not all that good.

  113. 113.

    Captain C

    @lowtechcyclist: In the spring of 2004,  while in my last semester of library school, I took an out-of-department class on media, politics, and advertising with a professor who worked as an advisor to then-Senator John Kyl (horrible R-AZ). He turned out to be a good prof who left his own politics out of class (and laughed when, after a class on negative campaigning I leaned into the knot of students surrounding him and quietly said, “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”) In one of the classes, he said that campaigns generally have 48 hours to get on top of a BS attack, otherwise it becomes part of the established narrative.

    Sure enough, when the swift boat lies came out, I watched horrified as the Kerry campaign’s inaction on response led to the story getting established, exactly as my professor had outlined.

    In retrospect, it should have been easy to respond to, to wit:

    Kerry: I don’t care what they say about me, after all this is politics. But I will not stand here and let these liars insult the bravery of my fellow swift boat crew. I call on President Bush to join me in condemning these scurrilous lies.

    Preznit Shrub: meep meep maybe we should ban all 503-c’s [or whichever type org was pushing the swift boat lies).

    JK: I called for the President to join me  in defending our brave troops, in a time of war , no less, and he responds by suggesting we restrict free speech, perhaps the most American freedom we have? This is unpatriotic nonsense and the opposite of supporting our troops.

    Also, the Dems should have been loudly pointing out that one of the swift boat liars admitted that he didn’t actually see what happened because he was too busy fleeing while his brothers in arms were under fire.

  114. 114.

    bluejersey43 (fka texasboyshaun)

    I saw the last name “Reed” and got excited for a minute, thinking it belonged to Ralph Reed. Oh well.

  117. 117.

    B3toed

    @Baud: Also: Rick Wilson’s campaign to equate another hero of the Vietnam conflict (why weren’t any of these shits over there?) with Osama bin Laden during the Chambliss/Cleland senate campaign in Georgia. Wilson and Tim Miller are pathetic excuses for men who never saw combat or even dipped their toes in a real shitty place. Cleland gave the country an arm and both legs while protecting his men. Try that Wilson, Reed or any of these other trumpers. And, yes, you asswipes helped put that orange piece of shit in the Oval Office. BTW, I was there.

Comments are closed.