ran a very good story this weekend about the genesis of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its founder, retired Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann. Here are the key paragraphs:

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was registered with the IRS on April 23. Its early expenditures included money for a Dallas-area private investigator, Tom Rupprath. Hoffmann said Rupprath's job was to find vets and collect their stories so that a single account could be presented to the public.

"If everyone was saying something different it could be confusing. We wanted one version of the truth," Hoffmann said.

....In a defining moment, on July 9 and 10, dozens of veterans, the group's top advisers and a film-making crew descended on a Marriott hotel in Rosslyn, Va., to film raw material for later commercials.

"The admiral helped me to see in hindsight what was really going on with Kerry," Thurlow said.It's a work of high art — if political assassination can be called high art. The only question is how these guys can still bear to look at themselves in the mirror when they wake up every morning.