WASHINGTON POST MISSES SWIFTEE-DOCUMENTARY LINK

This is from yesterday's Washington Post story about Sinclair's decision to air the anti-Kerry documentary Stolen Honor:

The documentary's producer -- a small production company in Harrisburg, Pa., headed by a former journalist, Carlton Sherwood -- has no official connection to the Swift boat group.

Apologies for repeating myself, but let me give you this link again -- it's to a September 29 press release that acknowledges a direct connection between the Swift boat liars and this film:

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a non-partisan, non-profit group representing more than 250 Swift Boat veterans who served with Senator John Kerry in Vietnam, announced today they are joining forces with a group of American prisoners of war who were held captive by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. The merger coincides with a new $1.4 million television ad campaign released by the new group Swift Vets and POWs For Truth...

The POWs also released a new 40 minute documentary titled Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, produced by Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award winning journalist Carlton Sherwood (www.stolenhonor.com)....

So what's going on here? It seems to me that the mechanism for attacking Kerry's war record may well have been designed months ago: The Swift boat guys organize themselves as a 527, do a book, and run ads, and at roughly the same time Sherwood does a documentary "independently" (while arrangements are made with GOP-friendly Sinclair to show the film on TV in the fall). Then, in the closing weeks of the campaign, the Swiftees' 527 join forces with a heretofore distinct group to release Sherwood's "independent" film.

If the documentary had been made under the aegis of the Swift boat guys' 527, it would be seen as a political ad and couldn't be shown on TV as "news" during the campaign. Conversely, if the Swiftees hadn't organized as a 527, they couldn't have run ads.

And yes, I think Karl Rove called this elaborate square dance.