Posted on 10/06/2004 5:00:54 PM PDT by Jacob Kell
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney probably did not intend to direct millions of television viewers to a Web site calling for President Bush's defeat but that's what a slip of the domain achieved.
Anyone who heeded Cheney's advice and clicked on "factcheck.com" was greeted on Wednesday morning with a message from anti-Bush billionaire investor George Soros entitled "Why we must not reelect President Bush."
"President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values," Soros' message said.
Defending his record as Halliburton's chief executive, Cheney said in the Tuesday night debate that Democratic vice-presidential challenger John Edwards was trying to use Halliburton as a smokescreen. Any voter who wanted the facts, Cheney said, should check out factcheck.com -- which led to the Soros site.
The Web site Cheney had in mind, factcheck.org, was not amused when the vice president proved that he was not master of the factcheckers' domain.
Factcheck.org, run by the Annenberg Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said on its site on Wednesday that Cheney not only got the domain name confused, he had mischaracterized its fact-finding.
"Cheney ... wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton," the site said on Wednesday.
"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."
The White House Web site annotated the debate transcript, parenthetically noting that Cheney meant factcheck.org, not factcheck.com. It linked the transcript to factcheck.org.
Is it me, or does Soros seem like a villian from one of the "Rogue Warrior" book, you know, the ones by former Navy SEAL Richard "Demo Dick" Marcinko? Hopefully, after the election we can all say with joy and gusto: DOOM ON YOU, KERRY, EDWARDS, AND SOROS!
Well, that was a major blunder by Cheney...but I can't hold it against him. Even geek techno-heads tend to default to the .com domain. I know this from experience since I run domains that are on .net, .org, and .gov.
Not to be critical of you, but your posting this only helped to spread free advertisement of the site.
So what, if this post informs us. I want to be informed, good bad, or otherwise. Too many in our country remain willfully uninformed. That's why I came aboard FR in the first place. V's wife.
This was not a blunder. This was a minor nitpicky mistake for all but the anal rententive.
It could've been worse, he could've told people to go to whitehouse.com.....
He's only human after all! My shocked! Shocked, I tell you.
This won't change the mind of any undecideds (if there are any), who probably don't have much of a mind to begin with. How many people heard that in the debate and rushed right out to click on factcheck.com anyway?
Another case of much ado about not so much.
What would George Soros know about the American way?
Without that error on Cheney's part, rational people may never have stumbled upon that site, where the insane gather to babble. A short visit there by normal people, should convince them that the candidate that pleases the members there is to dangerous to rule.
I believe Cheney deliberately gave the wrong address. Joke's on the liberals.
I think "blunder" more than overstates an understandable misstatement that didn't confuse anybody as they easily found the correct site and took it from there.
BTW, Brit had the guy who runs the site on today. It's that Brooks Jackson who used to be on CNN. He was very good.
If he'd done that, we'd be handing the keys to the White House over to Kerry and crew right about now. Yikes.
I'll cut him some slack on this one.
Exactly what I just posted before reading that you said the same thing.
A blunder made by Kerry, for example, was saying how "WMD's" are moving across the Iraq border. While some wondered what he meant, I figured he meant to say "terrorists" and so it turned out to be. I didn't think anything of this human type of misspeaking and the fact that Cheney is being held to a standard of nothing less than perfect just tells the biased media tale.
Oooh, I hadn't thought of that. Good point!
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