Get ready to witness one of the most insidious, calculated and choreographed smear campaigns ever, as a group of Vietnam vets prepares to denounce Kerry as a coward and a liar who is unfit to serve. This is a replay of a similar scheme from three decades earlier, with the same cast of characters leading the charge.

John Kerry’s old nemesis – a fellow Vietnam vet picked by President Richard Nixon to discredit Kerry 30 years ago – is resurfacing today to declare him “unfit to be commander in chief.”

John O’Neill, who succeeded Kerry as commander of the same Navy Swift boat, will announce the formation of a new political group called Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, dedicated to undermining Kerry.

O’Neill says he has a letter signed by hundreds of Navy vets, including many who served with Kerry, saying he is not commander-in-chief material. O’Neill’s main beef is Kerry’s charge that U.S. troops committed atrocities in Vietnam.

“Our mission is to provide solid factual information relating to Mr. Kerry’s abbreviated tour of duty,” he wrote.

Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton said, “The group behind this is the same group that smeared Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the 2000 Republican presidential primary.”

The new attack comes as Kerry launched $25 million in new ads stressing his Bronze Star and Silver Star and featuring a veteran whose life he saved.

Bush has spent $40 million on ads tagging Kerry as soft on defense, and Republicans have orchestrated a wide-ranging attack on his Vietnam record – including questioning the three Purple Hearts that sent him home early.

While it may seem counterintuitive to go after Kerry’s war service, the tactic worked against McCain. Sources in Bush’s 2000 operation said the idea was never to sway voters but to infuriate the candidate.

McCain reacted furiously in 2000, helping to derail his campaign. Kerry, meanwhile, was reduced to angry stammering when challenged about his medals on ABC last week.

O’Neill, a Houston lawyer, is emerging to spearhead the new attack, just as he did for the Nixon White House in the 1970s.

Nixon’s secret tapes captured him fretting with aides about the political threat Kerry posed and plotting to “destroy” him. O’Neill, an articulate young vet who had criticized Kerry’s anti-war speeches, was invited to the White House in 1971 and encouraged to debate Kerry.

“Give it to him, give it to him,” Nixon told O’Neill.

O’Neill says he is not coordinating with the White House this time around.

This is a brilliant tactic, in a depraved sort of way. Don’t go after the enemy’s perceived weakenesses — no, instead go straight for his perceived strengths and then cut him off at the knees.

Kerry’s trump card is his stellar military service, which cannot be questioned. Well, it can be, but only with the most scurrilous of methods: Having compulsive liar Karen Hughs say how “troubled” she is by quetstions of whether Kerry threw down medals or ribbons in protest of the Vietnam War 30 years ago; raising asinine questions about whether he deserved his purple hearts; accusing him of betraying his fellow soldiers when he did no such thing, etc.

Despite the wave of assaults, Kerry’s record cannot be so easily blackened. So you’ve got to hit harder, meaner, in a way that gets the message across to voters. What better way than having a group of other Vietnam vets all stand together and rip Kerry’s record, denounce him as a man and as a leader, and declare him unit for office? These guys were all eyewitnesses to Kerry’s incompetence. How can they all be wrong?

Or at least that’s what they’ll try to convey. They’ll do it well. They’ll all be “on-message,” as Karen Hughes and Karl Rove have taught them to be. It will be a gang bang the likes of which we’ve rarely seen in American politics. And it will illustrate once more just how low the Bush campaign people can go, and how free of moral scruples they are. And tragically, it just may work. (Never mind that so many other vets have described Kerry as a true leader and hero.)

Too bad that this type of character assassination is status quo for Bush & Co.

McCain must hate Bush with a fierce passion. I would love to see him jump ship and join Kerry, impossible though it may be. Then we’d have an election campaign for the books.

UPDATE: I just saw the latest Kerry campaign ad, and it cleverly points out how Kerry worked with John McCain to find out the fate of US POWs and MIAs in Vietnam. Brilliant, in several ways.