smear (sm�r) To stain or attempt to destroy the reputation of; vilify: political enemies who smeared his name.

From that one (of several) definitions of the word "smear," the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are most certainly trying to do just that to Sen. John Kerry.

The only problem, after reading the book inspired by their opposition to Kerry, Unfit for Command, is that the objective reader is left with a great amount of doubt about Kerry's reputation. The Swift Boat Veterans don't believe Kerry deserves one as a war hero, so they are certainly trying to destroy it.

Giving Kerry the benefit of the doubt on every event connected to his three Purple Hearts, his Bronze Star and his Silver Star, there is still enough enough of a dark side to the Kerry-Vietnam story that his campaign staff can't explain. That ensures the story won't go away.

- Did Kerry commit war crimes or not, as he said he did on Meet the Press in 1971?

- Why didn't Kerry give Al Hubbard, his comrade in 1970 and 1971 at Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the scrutiny that he is now giving to the Swift Boat Veterans like Larry Thurlow? Hubbard, as it turned out, lied about his rank in the military, lied about serving in Vietnam and lied about being wounded in Vietnam. As Unfit For Command also notes, Hubbard met secretly with a top Communist negotiator for North Vietnam during the time period of the Paris Peace Talks, and received funding from the American Communist Party. Yet, Kerry never publicly questioned Hubbard's credentials. His campaign staff, however, is questioning Thurlow's and any other Swift Boat Veteran who has called Kerry's credentials into doubt.

- Kerry's "Cambodia" story also won't go away. After retracting an earlier claim - seared (seared) into his mind - that he spent Christmas Eve, 1968 in Cambodia (illegally at President-elect Nixon's orders), Kerry's new story is that he went into Cambodia a few times during January and February 1969. But an extensive timeline in Unfit of Kerry's assignments, service records, medal citations and other accounts - combined with Kerry's own timeline on his web site - makes that scenario almost as unlikely as the Christmas in Cambodia story.

But perhaps the biggest question left unanswered is why so many men who went into battle with Kerry so long ago would step forward - at tremendous personal risk of attacks - to tell America the man shouldn't be president? Where was the Anti-Bush National Guard Vets Group? The Anti-Quayle group? Where were all the guys who served with Bob Dole, who had stories undercutting his fitness to serve as president? George H.W. Bush?

If you're on the left - like Josh Marshall - you blow it off as a Republican dirty trick. That, somehow, Karl Rove orchestrated it all. But raise your hand if you've ever seen anyone - anyone at all - create the kind of antipathy and bitterness out of whole cloth that you see from Paul Galanti toward Kerry in this video.

In the end, Unfit for Command is stunning not so much for the names, dates, times and places that author John O'Neill says undercut Kerry. It's the anger and venom against him that would be hard for anyone to manufacture.

At the Democratic National Convention last month, the party tried to portray Kerry as Audie Murphy. In the book, Tedd Peck, a former Navy lieutenant who served with Kerry and spent months in the hospital as a result of war wounds, reportedly told him after they were both assigned to the same part of the Vietnam jungle: "Kerry, follow me no closer than a thousand yards. If you get any closer, I'll teach you what a real Purple Heart is."

With a thousand yards between them, the Kerry campaign would probably say that doesn't count as "serving together."

For Peck, at least, that may have been the idea.

Unfit for Command is now becoming more available than it had been for the past several weeks. People will read it and decide for themselves. It's not the stories and allegations that the Kerry camp has been able to debunk or argue. It's the stories - and bitterness - it hasn't even tried to counter that could wind up keeping his campaign under water.