Cheney gets facts wrong urging others to seek truth

"Neither George Soros nor any organization or company with which he is affiliated owns the fact-check.com domain name."

Michael Vachon, chief of staff of www.georgesoros.com

If US Vice President Dick Cheney told viewers once on Tuesday night, he told them at least a dozen times: Senator John Edwards had his facts wrong. Check out the truth, Cheney said, on www.factcheck.com.

But anyone clicking on that Internet site on Wednesday instead found a message Cheney had not intended, or expected: "Why we must not re-elect President Bush."

The vice president wanted to send people to www.factcheck.org, a nonpartisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

But in urging viewers to check out www.factcheck.com, Cheney had instead sent them to a small Web site that simply could not handle the heavy traffic -- 48,000 people in one hour. So the site, which sells educational material, found what it considered a "creative and amusing quick fix."

According to a lawyer for the site's owner, John Berryhill, the company -- Name Administration Inc of the Cayman Islands -- decided to bounce the crowd to another site. But which one? How about George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has given US$18 million to Democratic advocacy groups to defeat President George W. Bush? Click. In an instant, viewers were redirected to www.georgesoros.com.

Berryhill said his clients did not want to appear to support Cheney and did not want to send people to a site that could make money from the Web traffic.

When it came to Soros and his page, www.georgesoros.com, his staff was simply perplexed. His chief of staff, Michael Vachon, issued a statement on Wednesday: "Neither George Soros nor any organization or company with which he is affiliated owns the factcheck.com domain name, and we are not responsible for it redirecting visitors to our site. We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events."

Then there was the Annenberg Public Policy Center's site, www.factcheck.org. Its director, Brooks Jackson, and his staff just wanted to get the facts right -- as Cheney had tried to do. So for those lucky enough to hit .org instead of .com, the center posted a statement on its site that read:

"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."