Cheney Drops the Ball

[Nicholas_J]

The vice president declines to refute Edwards during the debate.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2004, at 12:50 AM PT


CLEVELAND—Does Dick Cheney know that he told voters watching the vice presidential debate to go to GeorgeSoros.com? In response to a series of attacks from John Edwards on Cheney's tenure as CEO of Halliburton, the vice president said that Kerry and Edwards "know the charges are false. They know that if you go, for example, to factcheck.com, an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton." One problem with Cheney's rebuttal: He misspoke. He meant to say "factcheck.org.," rather than ".com." George Soros capitalized on Cheney's error, snatched up the URL, and now if you type "factcheck.com" into your browser, you get redirected to a page titled, "Why we must not re-elect President Bush: a personal message from George Soros."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2107809/

[liberalmuse]

1. It's nice having a billionaire on our side for a change.

Hell, forget the money--someone who quickly leaps on an opportunity. That was brilliant!

[BootinUp]

2. Soros is on a mission. Lol.

[TexasSissy]

3. Sweeeet. How could Cheney make such a mistake? (not that that's

unusual for him - mistakes, that is)

[molly]

4. Hehehehehe

:kick: :kick: :kick:

[debatepro]

5. Check your facts

You are fee to copy and edit what i say if you want to send it as a letter to the editor.

Cheney trying to be coy with the internet savvy crowd made the biggest blunder of the debate when he plugged factcheck.COM... Anyone who went to factcheck.com noticed that it redirected them to www.georgesoros.com. George Soros is the billionaire currency speculator that is funding several progressive leaning 527's most notably Moveon. The problem is that the two main headlines on the page are "Why we must not re-elect President Bush: A Personal Message from George Soros" and "President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values." If that wasn't enough the website factcheck.org issued a statement saying that their message was about a advertisement and that quote "Edwards was mostly right." A blunder of colossal proportions.



From Factcheck.ORG
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=272
"Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted "for the war" and "to commit the troops, to send them to war." He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry's proposals.

Edwards falsely claimed the administration "lobbied the Congress" to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.

Cheney got our domain name wrong -- calling us "FactCheck.com" -- and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton.

In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right."

[Nicholas_J]

9. One of the things that most annoyed me last night

Was Cheney;s trying to link Saddam's payment of 25,000 dollars to the widows or families of suicide bombers to an act of sponsoring terrorism when it absolutely is not.

One of the problems that is causing the U.S. so much difficulty in Iraq as well as the rest of the Middle East is a refusal to see, the situation other than in the light of the Israeli point of view.

In fact, Saddams payment to the families of suicide bomers is not an incentive, but under Islamic law, a religious obligation. It was done by Saddam to try to curry favor with religious but not fundamentalist Muslims, as one of his biggest problems came from his cimittment to secularism.

In fact, as most Muslims view the suicide bombers as mujihaddin (fighters for jihad...i.e. holy warriors), Islamic law requires a good Muslim to provide for the widows and orphans of those who die in the cause of holy war. Of course, Americans could never bring themselves to state that the acts of the suicide bombers may be in fact, something that to them is not evil, but in fat a religious obligation, not based on fanaticism, but on being completely beaten down, exacerbates this situation to a greater degree than need bt.

The very fact that the media and the Bush Administration attempt to label these actions as evil, rather than acts of desperation has also lent to these acts becoming even more frequent and desperate.

In fact there is one corelation to the increase in suicide bombings and the inccrease in terrorist acts againt U.S. targets that very few politicians draw. There was a spike in suicide bombing that co-incided with the election of George Bush and his statements that he was not going to have anythingto do with the nation building in the middle-east. That is to say he was going to sit back and allow Israel to control the situation any way that they felt like and that the U.S. was going to continue to finance their ability to do so militarily.

Taking the view that there are actually no terrorist, but ordinary human beings who have been driven to extraordinary behaviors by situations which to them are intolerable would go far to create an environment in which the peace process could be brought forward.

The attacks on Arafat as being a partnier in the peace process who is blocking the process is part another aspect of the problem noted above. Arafat is the embodiment of the ordinary person driven to extraordinary actions by situations he considers intolerable.

Until this becomes the view of those who use thmeselves as weapons in a cause they find just, peace will not be acheived.

When one remembers that the Israeli's themselves engaged in what would be defined as terrorism in order to deal with a situation they viewed as intolerable,in order to gain a homeland, one can see the persepctive of the suicide bombers in a different light.

The strangest aspect of all of this is that the nation that could provide the United States with the best advice on how to deal with thie situation in the middle east is the one that has been driven furthest away from the United States. That is France. Only France has had the eperience of trying to bring a western style government to a Muslim nation with the colonization of Algeria. The results we are seeing are very similar, in that just as the Algerians felt that they were second class citizens in the "French Democracy" the Iraqi's view the U.S. sponsored governments in the same way. The Iraqi's already know that the Bush Administration is already drawing limits upon the type of government that the Iraqi's will be allowed to vote for. They certainly will not be allowed to establish and Islamic government based on Sharia law, regardless of whetther they do so by electing a representative style government ehil doing so. They are going to be expected to set up a constitution based on western ideas rather than Islamic ones.

Even more amusing to me is that while Saddam gave what could be considered alms to the widows and orphans of people most muslims view as soldiers, not as terrorists, Cheney and Haliburton have had more of a direct connection to funding terrorism. Haliburton , through its international subsidiaries earned money in Iran, but in the process it also assisted Iran to make money itself, part of which is give by Iran to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Whichmeans that by doing business in Iran, Halliburton is sponsoring terrorism, an in fact, directly providing fundin to the suicide bombers before the fact, and not after it.

[Inland]

6. Nice catch! nt

[KoKo]

7. How did Soros "snatch up the url" for Fact Check. org? He did this

overnight? What? Could one of you techies explain this to a clueless?

I thought Fact Check.org. was a legit site?

[sendero]

8. I can only speculate...

... but this is the only way it could work IMHO.

factcheck.com must have already been a functioning domain with a host. when Dick spewed his error, someone must have contacted the domain owner and got them to agree to change their home page to a simple redirect.

I say this because:

1) it is highly unlikely that a name like factcheck.com was not already a registered domain

2) even if it were available, it takes a minimum of 12 hours or so after you set up the domain for all the the nameservers to allow you to reach the new site using "factcheck.com". (This used to take 48 hours, it is getting faster all the time).

[life_long_dem]

10. KoKo01

Factcheck . com
It may have been an idle website or he already owned it. Either way it BACKFIRED tremendously.

[RoyalWickedness]

11. factcheck.com

Is owned by a company named Domain Name Sales, located in the Cayman Islands. It was registered to them on 4 February, 2004. I'm not familiar with this particular company, but sounds like they are one of the many co's that buy up domain names in bulk as they become available, and then resell them at a profit. All Soros would have had to do is purchase the domain from this company and host it on a private server, of which I'm sure he owns many. Hell, for all I know, he could own Domain Name Sales.....