Burnt Orange Report

Factcheck.com

By Byron LaMasters

Josh Marshall has the best speculation I can find.

To recap:

Cheney mentions "Factcheck.com" during the debate as an independent non-partisan location where viewers see a defense of Cheney's connections to Halliburton.

Next, millions of viewers (including myself) head over to Factcheck.com, overloading their bandwidth. When the dust cleared, we all realize that it's a dead site. Bought up by someone who used the random hits the site got to make money via ads.

Right after the debate, "Factcheck.com" starts redirecting to "GeorgeSoros.com". It would be interesting to know if Soros owned FactCheck.com or if a Democrat owned it an immidiately redirected it to GeorgeSoros.com. Either way, some one was on top of things - and it wasn't Dick Cheney.

He meant to direct viewers to FactCheck.org (yeah, old farts just don't seem to grasp the difference between that .org and .com thing). And what does FactCheck.org have to say:

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.

[...]

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.

Hah!