During last night's vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney advised viewers interested in his version of the facts about Halliburton to visit factcheck.com. Evidently, he meant to direct them to factcheck dot ORG, a site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, but mis-spoke.
Factcheck dot COM redirects you to GeorgeSoros.com which contains arguments on "why we must not re-elect President George Bush." Whups.
For their part, the factcheck dot ORG folks say:
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.
Link to factcheck dot COM. BoingBoing reader Clay says Soros and Co. have no idea who directed the vicepresidential linklove their way. "My friend designed the Soros blog and says [redirecting factcheck.com to the Soros site] was a happy and unrequested favor. Whois turns up not enough of a clue…"
Update: BoingBoing reader Dave Hayden points us to an AP story which says:
Cheney cited FactCheck.com, a for-profit advertising site based in the Cayman Islands. The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits — " about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.
"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.
They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.
Link to story.
