Vice Presidential Debate - Cheney / Edwards

It was politics as usual. Specific questions asked and different questions answered. I was not in debate, so I don't know all of the proper debate strategies, but tonight they could have saved a lot of time, as with most of these political debates, if they would simply answer the questions asked of them and move on. Why the need to ramble and use all of one's alloted time?

It gets old hearing the banter from both sides.

Being of the more web literate, the biggest faux pas of the whole debate that jumped out at me was when Vice President Cheney referred to factcheck.com, when many know he meant factcheck.org. Ouch!



I am sure it will help factcheck.com's hit count. I decided to follow up on factcheck.com and found the .com versus .org to be the biggest irony of all (the contrast of the two being as different as the old whitehouse.com versus whitehouse.gov). It turns out that factcheck.com redirects you to georgesoros.com, which has George Soros personal message, "Why we must not re-elect President Bush". Oops!



I hate to say it, but in my opinion the worst performance at the debate was from Gwen Ifill, the moderator from PBS. She allowed the candidates to control the debate. She did not have the candidates answer the questions she asked of them, she allowed them to take time when answering subsequent questions to address previous questions, and at one point even lost track of who was suppose to answer.

I also don't believe the personal level of questioning was in order for the debate. Was she trying to get them to attack each other?

Maybe they should have simply set the candidates across from one another and set the old rockem sockem robots down in between them and let them go at it.



Updated 10/6/04 @ 8:24am:

Factcheck.org caught the slip and posted about it here.

It appears that other News organizations are posting about the mixup today as well.