HELIOLITH

Pretty funny stuff: Apparently (I was too tired to actually listen to the old warhawk drone on) Dick Cheney repeatedly plugged factcheck.com in his debate against John Edwards last night. Go ahead and click it for the punch line, before I spoil it for you.

Thanks to comments by “Bat Guano” on Kevin Drum’s blog entry, as pointed out to me by Saheli. For an extra ration of irony, I kept chasing this one. If you read the left hand pane on georgesoros.com, it says:

FactCheck.com Correction: We do not own the FactCheck.com domain name and are not responsible for it redirecting to GeorgeSoros.com. We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events. We believe that Vice President Cheney intended to direct viewers of the Vice-Presidential Debate to FactCheck.org.

Now if you go there, the first headline is: “Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts: Getting it wrong about combat pay, Halliburton, and FactCheck.org” and they proceed to lay into him:

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.

Of course, I’m a laggy evening blogger, after working 10-hour days, and my intuition that my favorite blog boingboing might have already followed through on this story turned up correct, and they actually round it out with evidence about who actually was responsible for the re-direction. (The benefits of multiple thousands of readers for instant feedback). What an ironic blunder for poor ol’ Dick.
(others via technorati)
Update: 2 days later the Washington Post wrote a story on this.