If you watched the Vice Presidential debates last night, you might have caught Dick Cheney refer viewers to a Web site called “factcheck.com” for more information on the crimes he committed while he was CEO of Halliburton.
He actually meant factcheck.org, a non-partisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania.
It isn’t surprising that a guy who lied about making bogus connections between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists would not be able to discern the difference between a .com and a .org. I’m sure that Cheney is confused by the internets; he probably has his secretary send email for him. You can hear Cheney deliciously contradicting himself on this matter in a video ad (Windows Media or Real player). Ha ha, caught you, you big fat liar.
Cheney is paying the price for not having his facts straight on factcheck.org, though. The crafty owners of factcheck.com now redirect it to the site of progressive financier George Soros, which sports the headline “WHY WE MUST NOT RE-ELECT PRESIDENT BUSH.”
As if getting the address of the fact-checking site wrong isn’t enough, the real factcheck.org doesn’t paint quite a rosy picture of the VP’s actions while CEO of Halliburton:
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.
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I read this, but part of the response was very lame. FactCheck.org did explain the deferred compensation from Halliburton, which they ignore/deny in this statement. It is wrong to imply that Cheney is corrupt because he received deferred compensation, which is something that Kerry/Edwards have been doing.
I think the matter of deferred compensation is the least of Cheney’s worries. From the site:
“[Halliburton] paid fines for matters that took place while Cheney was in charge. And in fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Aug. 3 that Halliburton will pay $7.5 million to settle a matter that dates back to 1998, when Cheney was CEO.
“Halliburton failed to disclose a change in its accounting procedures that resulted in making its earnings look better. Cheney himself was not charged with any wrongdoing, however. The SEC said Cheney ‘provided sworn testimony and cooperated willingly and fully in the investigation.’
“On other matters, Edwards said Halliburton ‘did business with Libya and Iran, two sworn enemies of the United States’ and is now ‘under investigation for having bribed foreign officials’ while Cheney was CEO.
“Iran: Indeed, Halliburton has said it does about $30 million to $40 million in oilfield service business in Iran annually through a subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services Ltd. The company says that the subsidiary fully complies with US sanctions laws, but the matter currently is under investigation by a federal grand jury in Houston.
Bribery Investigation: U.S. and French authorities currently are investigating whether a joint venture whose partners included a Halliburton subsidiary paid bribes or kickbacks to win a $12 billion construction project in Nigeria.”
Seems to me like Iran is either in the Axis of Evil or not, which is it?. Also, the kind of accounting problems that Halliburton had under Cheney is exactly the kind of thing that might land a CEO behind bars today because of Sarbanes-Oxley.