Something important happened this weekend. The main attack arm of the Bush campaign collapsed under the weight of it's own lies.

Unless you're living in a swing state, you may never have heard of the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," but they were a major part of the Bush/Cheney '04 re-election strategy. This weekend, their effort to tar John Kerry's record in Vietnam -- critical to reign in Republicans who are secretly unhappy with Bush and tempted to trust someone with actual front-line experience -- blew up in their faces.

This is a group of people who made some shit up to push the idea that John Kerry's whole story -- his medals, the testimony of his crewmates, the official Navy record -- was all a buch of bullshit. They were funded by a friend of Bush's in TX who could drop $100,000, and they have begun airing ads telling "their side" of the story about Kerry's service in Vietnam, particularly this one point where he saved a guy named Jim's life.

Well, as political character assasinations go, this was an amateur job. While the "Siwft Boat Vetrans For Truth" story initially seemed to spark some interest, it has now been revealed as specifically contradicted at every level by multiple eyewitness accounts, the standing official record, and even their own past statements.

Today the final link in the chain was forged when it was revealed that a member of the Bush/Cheney '04 "Veterans Steering Committee" was also illegally working for the group. In spite of weeks of denials of coordination, the Bush/Cheney '04 Campaign was forced to fire personnel because it's now an unavoidable conclusion that they straight up broke the law.

Not only were they pushing slander, they were illegally coordinating with unregulated soft-money donations. The whole effort will go down in political history books as an bungling exercise in criminal subversion of the electoral process; an early 21st Century footnote to a column headed by Watergate.

But don't be surprised. This is really nothing new; they did the same (and worse) to John McCain in 2000. The attack dogs in the Republican Party truly are profressionals, and clearly have no shame.

So I think this is a major break; more or less the end of Bush's most ferocious negative attack against Kerry. I think it's going to backfire, but in spite of 1,200+ stories on this development, drudge is leading with Bush going to Athens, so I guess we'll have to see.