Wednesday, October 6, 2004

Recommended Reading

Here's a good article by Frank Rich about how the Bush-Cheney campaign strategy seems to be coming unglued. The Times is now making Rich's weekend column available on Thursday morning which is why the site says this article was published on October 10, 2004.

• Posted at 9:42 PM · LINK

We Deliver (Maybe)

I recently had an unpleasant experience with a local market chain that delivers...or, at least, tries to. I wrote it all up and posted it as an entry in NOTES from me.

• Posted at 3:31 PM · LINK

Major Oops!

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?

• Posted at 2:23 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I've probably mentioned this before but among my many complaints about political discourse these days is the devaluation of the word, "lie." A lie is now anything your opponent ever said which can possibly be interpreted as inaccurate.

To be completely non-partisan about it, here are two examples. In the 2000 Presidential Debate, Al Gore mentioned going to inspect fire damage in Parker County in Texas with FEMA head James Lee Witt. It turned out that while Gore had accompanied Witt to other disaster sites in Texas, the Parker County trip had been with someone else. I thought that was an innocent mistake but Republicans sold it hard as some sort of deliberate falsehood. Over on the National Review site, it's still cited on a page called "Gore Lies."

Last night, Dick Cheney said that the first time he'd ever met John Edwards was when they walked out on stage and shook hands. Democrats quickly produced photos and records that showed the two men had been together on at least two occasions, and quoted Tim Russert as saying he saw them shake hands backstage before the debate. This is being sold in many venues as a lie.

I don't think these things are lies. And even if they are, I don't think they reflect that badly on their speakers. I'd settle for any elected official if the worst lie his opponents could pin on him was something so trivial. The Democrats oughta be hammering Cheney on those aluminum tubes that were allegedly for nuclear weapons but actually weren't, or for statements about Weapons of Mass Destruction or even Halliburton. And we shouldn't be letting anyone get away with defining "lie" so loosely that it loses its meaning.

• Posted at 12:17 PM · LINK