In last night's debate, Dick Cheney did not directly rebut John Edwards' allegations about Halliburton. Instead, he directed people to go read the non-partisan website, www.factcheck.com where, he said, they'd investigated the charge and debunked it. Cheney was wrong on a number of accounts…
- He got the URL wrong. The site he had in mind was actually www.factcheck.org, a page maintained by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
- The actual www.factcheck.com is a name owned by a "placeholder" company, meaning that they haven't put a site at that address. When they started to be overloaded with hits at that address, its proprietors decided to forward everyone to someone else's site. They picked www.georgesoros.com, an anti-Bush site maintained by the Liberal billionaire.
- So if you went to the site Cheney gave out, you found yourself on a page where the headline was, "President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values." This is probably not the message Cheney wanted all of America to study.
- And then if you somehow found your way to www.factcheck.org, you found that their Hallburton article debunked different accusations against Cheney and that company. The article there in no way refuted the charges that Edwards had made.
- Today, that website — which I guess now has Cheney's endorsement as a place to go for facts — has this page up that corrects a lot of things said by both Cheney and Edwards. It starts by saying, "Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co." So his only defense against Edwards' charges has collapsed on him.
A number of other things that were said by both men are not standing up to the test of time, even 18 hours later. I really like the fact-checking of public officials' statements, even when it says my candidate got something wrong. I don't think these lapses were all lies. Some of them were just innocent errors about unimportant matters.
On the other hand, I think some of what Cheney said, like the line about not linking Iraq to 9/11, were lies about important matters. And now that I think of it, the bottom line on who "lost" (still dislike that term) may have to do with who gave the opposition some great footage to use in a campaign commercial. Does anyone think the Democrats or some 527 aren't at this very moment editing an ad spot with two clearly-contradictory Cheney sound bites?