The implication was that the Republican Party created the Swift Boat organization in order to unfairly smear John Kerry. That has certain implications as it puts into question the validity of the organization and its credibility. That is why the left tried so hard to tie them to Republicans to delegitimize them.
If they are considered to be a group that was created independent of the political parties, that gives them a powerful legitimacy because groups don't come into being for no reason.
That is why I try to make the distinction between an entity created by the Republican Party or its operatives and one that came into being on its own. It all has to do with legitimacy. People tend to disregard party machines, naturally assuming that they're going to attack the other party and ignore them as part of standard partisanship. When they are a separate group that had nothing to do with the party apparatus, then people sit up and take notice as they are not part of the standard partisan noise. MoveOn.org, for instance, is basically made up of ex-Clinton people, so people treat them as just another cog in the Democratic Party machine. The Swift Boaters differed in that they self-organized with people who had no ties to any particular political party and in fact differed greatly in their party affiliation. That gives them a certain credibility that a cog in the Republican apparatus wouldn't have, and that's why they were so effective in bringing down John Kerry.
Do you see the difference now in what I'm trying to say and why funding by the right in no way actually ties them to the official Republican Party apparatus? With no ties to the GOP, that means they were not considered by the public to be a right-wing smear machine, but rather a group with legitimate criticisms.
