Cheney slips on website tip

Vice President Dick Cheney probably did not intend to direct millions of television viewers to a website calling for President George W. Bus...

Vice President Dick Cheney probably did not intend to direct millions of television viewers to a website calling for President George W. Bush8217;s defeat but that8217;s what a slip of the domain achieved.

Anyone who heeded Cheney8217;s advice and clicked on factcheck.com on Wednesday morning was redirected to the site of anti-Bush billionaire investor George Soros that had a banner message saying 8216;8216;Why we must not re-elect President Bush.8217;8217;

The GeorgeSoros.com site later put up a notice saying that it does not own factcheck.com and was not responsible for directing readers from that site to the Soros message. 8216;8216;We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events,8217;8217; it said. A lawyer for the factcheck.com site was not available for comment.

Defending his record as Halliburton8217;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 8212; which led to the Soros site.

The website Cheney had in mind, factcheck. org, was not amused when the vice-president proved that he was not master of the Factcheckers8217; 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 mischaracterised its fact-finding.

8216;8216;Cheney 8230; wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton,8217;8217; the site said on Wednesday.

8216;8216;In fact we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn8217;t profited personally while in office from Halliburton8217;s Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney8217;s responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.8217;8217;

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The White House website annotated the debate transcript, parenthetically noting that Cheney meant factcheck.org, not factcheck.com. It linked the transcript to factcheck.org.

8212; Reuters