[IP] washingtonpost.com: Urging Fact-Checking, Cheney Got Site Wrong
Urging Fact-Checking, Cheney Got Site Wrong
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A08
Vice President Cheney dropped a dot-bomb Tuesday night when he
inadvertently directed millions of viewers of the vice presidential
debate to an Internet site critical of the Bush administration.
After Democratic nominee John Edwards raised some nasty allegations
about Halliburton Corp., the company Cheney once ran, Cheney angrily
responded to the "false" charges. "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," he said.
But when people followed Cheney's instructions, they wound up at a site
sponsored by administration antagonist George Soros. "Why we must not
re-elect President Bush," the site blared. "President Bush is
endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining
American values."
Evidently, Cheney meant to say FactCheck.org a site run by the
Annenberg Public Policy Center. Instead, he directed the nation's
attention to a Web site that refers people to sellers of dictionaries
and encyclopedias -- at least at first. The company behind the site,
Cayman Islands-based Name Administration Inc., which also owns sites
such as Lipbalm.com and Antarctica.com, was quickly overwhelmed.
"Suddenly they had 48,000 hits in an hour, then 100 hits a second,"
said John Berryhill, a lawyer for the company. "They had a technical
problem on their hands."
To avoid crashing, and to exact revenge on Cheney for causing it such
grief, Name Administration decided to forward traffic to
GeorgeSoros.com -- a site that could handle the traffic, was not
soliciting funds and clearly wasn't tied to Bush. "And you got to admit
it was kind of cute," Berryhill said.
Soros's Web site issued a statement saying it had nothing to do with
the redirection of traffic. "We are as surprised as anyone," said
Michael Vachon, Soros's chief of staff.
Gradually, people became aware of Cheney's mistake, and the White House
transcript of the debate was annotated with the correct address. But,
unfortunately for Cheney, FactCheck.org was not much more helpful than
Soros in knocking down Edwards's charges.
Cheney "wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was
making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of
Halliburton," the Annenberg site wrote in a posting yesterday. "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."
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12901-2004Oct6?
language=printer>
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