NPR's Mike Pesca declares that Gen. Wesley Clark pointing out that Barack Obama did not have to been shot down in a fighter plane to be qualified to be president is "pretty much the same as John Kerry and the swift-boating." Yes, aside from the fact that Clark's comment was accurate, was a response to CBS host Bob Schieffer's disparagement of Obama and did not become a well-funded attack ad campaign, it was exactly like swift-boating. With NPR tossing around the term "swift-boating," it's worth recalling that during the actual swift-boating of Kerry, the public radio service was worse than useless. As a FAIR Media Advisory (8/30/04) pointed out: The notion that reporters cannot pass some reasonable judgment about the ads was common. "There is no way that journalism can satisfy those who think that Kerry is a liar or that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are liars," asserted NPR senior Washington editor Ron Elving ( NPR.org, 8/25/04). And as Extra! later recalled (11-12/05):

When discussing the Swift Boat ads on NPR (8/9/04), FactCheck's [Brooks] Jackson cautiously called the Swift Boat Vets and the Kerry versions of the medals "two different views of reality," rebuking a caller who termed the allegations lies by saying, "We can't call these lies." Of course, if Jackson believed that one couldn't call one side of this debate a lie, then he should have labeled as false the Swift Boat ad's claim (repeated four times) that Kerry's view was a "lie"-something he refused to do.