On Friday, Senator Kerry challenged Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens to stand behind a bragging boast that he’d made while speaking at a Washington gala event on November 6.

According to accounts posted by a couple of conservative bloggers who attended the event and subsequently confirmed by other sources, Pickens was so sure of the smear machine that he’d bankrolled to the tune of some $3,000,000 over the previous three years that he flatly offered “a million dollars to anyone who could prove wrong anything the Swiftboat Veterans charged about Kerry.”

Not coincidentally, Pickens made his boast the day after an article published in a Massachusetts newspaper included this reply from Senator Kerry to an interviewer’s questions about the 2004 swiftboating smear campaign:

“Kerry, whose service as a U.S. Navy Swift boat skipper during the Vietnam War came under attack in his race against President Bush, said he has compiled a dossier on his war record critics that he wishes he had as the Democratic presidential nominee.

“We have put together a documented portfolio that frankly puts their lies in such a total light of absurdity and indecency, that should they ever rear their ugly heads again, we have every single ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted, and I welcome that in a sense,’’ Kerry said following a morning address to the South Shore Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a shame we weren’t able to produce all that at the time.’‘

“I have no doubt at all that some of the people involved on the other side don’t care about the truth, think nothing about distorting it, will not hesitate to say and do whatever they think is necessary to win,’’ Kerry said. “But I think we are now much more prepared and savvy about those kind of things, and certainly in my own involvement, I will make certain that people don’t get away with that.’‘

Also not coincidentally, the day after Pickens made that boast at the American Spectator dinner in Washington, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh led the carefully coordinated charge of right-wing pundits in repeating the same set of bogus talking points. As Media Matters noted in the lead to a detailed story refuting Limbaugh’s claims,

On his radio show, Limbaugh claimed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth “were right on the money, and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort.” In fact, most of the allegations the Swift Boat Veterans made about Sen. John Kerry’s Vietnam War service during the 2004 presidential campaign have been thoroughly discredited, often by official military records, but also by the Swift Boat accusers themselves, who struggled to keep their stories straight.

Needless to say, no matter how many times the Republican noise machine tries to whitewash the facts and re-brand old lies as supposed truth in attempt to reposition the swiftboaters and their ilk as renewed attack dogs for the 2008 campaign season, old lies are still lies and they’ve already been debunked over and over again.

So when word got around of Pickens’ bragging boast to lay a million dollars on the line for anyone who could disprove anything the swiftboaters had charged regarding JK’s service record, Senator Kerry decided it was the time for him to pick up that gauntlet and call Pickens’ bluff in public.

Pickens’ boast had been very clear and to the point, as was the Senator’s response to his challenge in the letter that he sent to the smear-funding Texan on Friday. Pickens had made a bet he couldn’t back up because he thought no one was listening at the time except more supporters of swiftboating like himself. But then Senator Kerry called him on it.

So, naturally, since Pickens already knew he couldn’t win the bet that he himself had made, he did the classic right-wing thing instead: he rewrote it retroactively so he could get out of having to live up to it.

When someone wants to renege on an offer by unilaterally changing the terms after the fact, there are plenty of things to call that kind of behavior. “Moving the goalposts.” “Weaseling the words.” “Breaking the rules.” “Cheating.” (Or, if you’re President Bush, you just call it “adding a signing statement” instead.)

Here at johnkerry.com, though, we have another word for it: Calvinball.

The game of Calvinball, as famously practiced by the comic strip characters Calvin and Hobbes, is pretty simple, really: there are no rules except the ones you make up as you go, and any player can change any rule at any time without having to inform any of the other players.

No wonder the right wing Republican noise machine and its newly refitted swiftboating smear squads love playing Calvinball with the truth so much.