When I was young, my dad refused to go to church. His stated reason was that “there were too many hypocrites there.” Later, evidently having realized that there were hypocrites everywhere, he joined the church and even became a Sunday School teacher. But he never had much regard for hypocrites.

He would have hated today’s Republican party. They’ve raised it to an art form.

This is the party who introduced the term “swiftboating” into the language. It’s defined as “a pejorative American neologism used to describe an unfair or untrue political attack.” In practice, it was a bunch of rich men sitting in a hotel room trying to decide how to smear John Kerry. Kerry had been awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts in Viet Nam. They decided to make an issue of whether he had honorably garnered all of those decorations. (Keep in mind that he was running against George W. Bush.)

So we have one candidate who served in Viet Nam and was decorated for that service against one who joined the reserves, but—by his own records—didn’t attend the required number of reserve meetings or complete the six years.

And the conversation was all about whether Kerry really got hurt badly enough to get a Purple Heart. A lot of people, most of them True Believers, didn’t see the irony in that. Nor did they note that almost everybody who spoke for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth seems to have modified their stories several times. However, it worked.

And it also worked when the George W. Bush campaign launched an innuendo-based smear campaign against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary, implying that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. The question was: Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?

Now we’re up to the race between Donald Trump and the opponent he calls “Crooked Hillary Clinton.” (Again, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone that The Donald’s debating skills almost rise to a fifth-grade school yard bully’s.) Trump, whose favorite phrase seems to be, “I have to be honest,” accuses Hillary of being a serial teller of falsehoods. And some people seem to believe him.

But check the facts as presented by PolitiFacts. PolitFacts scores statements by the exactness of their truth. They may downgrade the truthfulness of a statement by lack of context or improper wording. They’re pretty picky about saying that a statement is true. However, at the other end of the scale (False and Pants on Fire), it’s a clear-cut definition: It ain’t true, and there’s no speck of truth in it.

Here are their ratings from several hundred statements from each of the candidates’ speeches:

Rating

Clinton

Trump

True

23%

4%

Mostly True

28%

11%

Half True

21%

15%

Mostly False

15%

15%

False

11%

37%

Pants on Fire

2%

18%

Someone asked me the other day why I was supporting Hillary Clinton other than that she wasn’t Donald Trump (as if that wasn’t a sufficient reason), and I told him that since the Republicans had done their worst, from David Brock’s attempted character assassination over Whitewater in the 1990s to Trey Gowdy’s very expensive and totally useless attempted character assassination over the improperly-termed Benghazi hearings, he’s still with us. Anybody who can stand up against that much mudslinging is probably a better person than I am and is certainly a better person than Donald Trump.