Daily Kos indicates that there have been 6 Cheney tie-breaking votes, and Edwards has been present for all 6.
In addition, with specific reference to Cheney’s statement about being up there most Tuesdays (which he implied related to his role as President of the Senate), Cheney has actually presided over the Senate on a Tuesday … TWICE in the past four years. Hard to meet people when you aren’t showing up.
Interestingly, it appears that Edwards has also presided over the Senate twice in the past four years, filling in when Cheney has failed to appear.
Actually, Edwards said (after the debate) that he knew Cheney had stated something false, and Edwards’ wife told Cheney that directly when the wives joined the husbands on the stage.
I figure Edwards wasn’t about to responde to what (superficially, at least) appeared to be a warm greeting into a snotty little rejoinder.
President of the senate for the past four years. That would be Cheney. Now there are a hundred members of the Senate, give or take a few seats due to retirements or deaths(i.e. senator Wellstone). So you’re the leader of a group of about a hundred people for four years and there are some of them you haven’t met? Quite frankly I think it would be more of an indictment of Cheney if it were true than if it were false. Still kind of amusing to see the backfire of the comment. Designed to be a subtle dig at Edwards while re-inforcing the campaign smears about him and Kerry being frequently absent from the senate, just ends up being headline news.
Most Tuesdays, eh? In the past four years (see the link), Cheney’s presided over the Senate on exactly two Tuesdays.
I haven’t checked (nor have they) to see if Edwards was there on either of those occasions. It hardly seems worth bothering with.
BUT - Edwards has presided over the Senate on two Tuesdays in the past four years. So it seems like Cheney’s the slacker, and Edwards (at least on Tuesdays) is performing as much of Cheney’s Constitututional duty as Cheney is. Whaddaya know!
And Edwards’ hometown newspaper calling him “Senator Gone” was also a lie. Sure, there was a NC paper that pinned that moniker on Edwards once. But it wasn’t his hometown daily; it was a weekly in some other town.
Wow, that’s three big Cheney whoppers with extra cheese, in five short sentences.
Can you say “pathological liar”? I knew you could!
I’m intrigued by the morality of someone who thinks Edwards’ “poor Senate performance” (has this even been established as fact yet, btw?) is less important than the Vice President of the United States ripping off a series of whopping lies on national television, apparently figuring that people will believe him because of the office he holds.
I may be wrong, but I think that one of those instances was during the swearing in ceremony, for which there is photographic evidence of Dick Cheney and John Edwards being there at the same time. I would otherwise agree that hardly seems worth bothering with, except that it is great to highlight Cheney’s lies, and a statement that every single time Cheney was present in the Senate, Edwards was also there would be pretty devastating to Cheney’s lies.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that that is true: EVERY TIME, 100% of the instances when Cheney was present at a Senate session, Edwards was also there. I look forward to proof either way.
The best take on this I saw today was “Chenocchio.”
Wow–good catch! Even I, who assume Cheney is lying whenever he opens his mouth, was assuming that the Raleigh News and Observer had coined this epithet. The N&O is one of the better-respected dailies in NC, along with the Charlotte Oberver, so such an editorial from them would pack some weight.
But nobody’s ever heard of the Pilot. And Southern Pines is most famous for being a rich golfing community (at least, that’s most of what I heard about them when I lived in Durham), hardly a place that represents most of North Carolina.
Can’t take credit; just reading the blogs, and passing along the good catches of others. (Now the Subchapter S catch - that was all mine. :))
And you’re right - the gulf between the Raleigh News & Observer, which even many of us Yankees recognize as a quality paper, and the Pilot, which it seems not even that many NC residents know of, is immense.
Honestly, gang, I think that this is much sound and fury signifying nothing. Cheney took an opportunity to dig at Edwards and Edwards refused to rise to his bait. As a matter of fact, what impressed me most last night was Cheney’s refusing to play defense. Now, it meant that he refused to answer certain questions on occasion, but I was still mightily impressed.
And just so that Bricker neither misses it nor thinks that it slipped my mind, I’m still curious to know if he will respond to my contentions made in post #19? Because it fairly smacks of disingenuousnessicityism to claim that Cheney gives no more weight to Edwards than he does to the average prole.
As to Starving Artist, well, I’m damned if I know what you’re on about. I mean really! “Most lame”? Here I was thinking that you were capable of better. I am once more disappointed. More’s the pity. . .
Eh. Not a huge deal as far as I am concerned. It would have been much smarter if Cheney had said, "As far as I can recall . . . " and he certainly should have done that. Because the cited “meetings” that these two have had do not sound very memorable, especially if you are super busy and meeting all sorts of suits constantly.
It would be difficult, I’d guess, to distinguish whether you’d met someone or merely seen them from a distance or on TV coverage. You know who they are, but is it because you met them, or because you saw them on TV? I would think that it might be easier to remember meeting someone if something significant or substantial would had taken place–a fleeting handshake in a hallway or some other slight encounter might not cut it.
I’m guessing that’s what happened here. Cheney should have been smarter about how he phrased it, though, and that surprises me. Say what you will about him, he seems shrewder than that–to allow himself to get caught into such an easy trap. He’s probably met almost everyone in Washington, but simply can’t remember all of them.
Please. Edwards is not just a suit, he is one of 100 members of the US Senate. Especially when the Democrats had a majority, every senator was important. No politician got anywhere forgetting faces.
BTW, the way the comment was dropped in shows clearly that it was not off the cuff, but prepared and practiced. But I’m sure Edwards had thought about attending, and had organized senate attending activities, so for Bushies that’s just the same, right?
Bush and Cheney lie so much, that it’s become routine. A lie like this is trivial compared to the lies about Iraq’s nuclear capability. Bushies like SA have become so desensitized, they don’t care about the truth anymore. Eat with the pigs, and you come up smelling like shit.
Who said anything about forgetting faces? I am sure that Cheney knew who he was, very well. I don’t doubt that Cheney knew that he’d glanced at Edwards somewhere, sometime. What I don’t know (at this point) is whether Cheney remembered one of the meetings that he had with Edwards.
Sure it was. Which makes it all the more astonishing that Cheney didn’t use a qualifyer like "to my recollection . . . " or something like that. Pretty stupid. But a calculated lie? Okay, perhaps. But more likely, a stupid, mistake that now is biting him in the butt–and was destined to bite him in the butt since it was so easy to verify as not true.
Look. The reason I don’t make a big deal of this is because I know how my own memory works. I honestly don’t always remember encountering someone. My sister is constantly reminding me of stuff I did, places I went to, people I met. (She seems to have a far better memory for some of this stuff–I guess my head is stuffed with movie trivia or something.)
I also know how it is to travel back and forth between two different places a lot (L.A. and Hooterville) and how confusing that can make things as well. I can’t remember for the life of me–did I go to the Comp USA in Hooterville to do that thing, or was it in L.A.? Are there any [insert chain store here) in Hooterville or are they only in L.A.? Did I actually go there, or did I just talk about going there? Did I go somewhere else instead? Sometimes, I cannot remember. I’m not feeble-minded, I’ve just got other stuff jumbled in my brain. I doesn’t mean that I have forgotten the existence of certain things, it just means that it gets a little confusing. Therefore, I simply do not find it too hard to believe that this very busy guy can’t remember some apparently not terribly significant encounters with another guy, especially when this very busy guy is meeting people all the damned day, and they’re all Really Important People.
But sure, he could be lying. He could have decided to deliberately lie, even though he must have known that his lie could easily be refuted, thus embarassing him. It’s possible. Mind-numbingly stupid and un-shrewd (which doesn’t sound like Cheney to me), but possible.
Personally, I’m amused that FactCheck.Org, the site whose name Cheney screwed up, is calling him a liar on this issue of the Edwards meeting.
NOT ONLY THAT, but Cheney told people to check the site as a rebuttal to Edwards’s comments on Halliburton. FactCheck says of those, “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.”
Imagine this. The police call you down to the station, because a Kwikkie Mart was recently robbed. They’ve got a suspect in custody, but he claims that during the time that the store was robbed, he was at a party, and he knows you were at the party, too. The police have called you down to corroborate your story.
You don’t remember seeing him at the party. Do you tell the police that this is the first time you’ve met him?
My point is that, if you know your memory for faces isn’t perfect, and if volunteering the information that you’ve never met a person before will seriously impugn their character, you shouldn’t volunteer that goddamn information.
Was Cheney lying? I doubt it: I doubt that, when he said those words, he knew they were false. However, I strongly suspect that he didn’t know those words were true.
And playing fast and loose with the truth, not bothering to get your facts straight as long as it allows you to perform a character assassination, is almost as bad as telling deliberate lies.
You may be right here, but I strongly suspect that Cheney knew it wasn’t true. He just doesn’t care.
He’s putting out a sales pitch. He’d prefer one which he thought would work, and was also true, but he doesn’t have anything like that available. He down to a choice between one which he thinks might work, but isn’t true, and another one which is true but he thinks probably won’t work. He values the sale more than anything else, so which one does he go for?
Cheney was baiting Edwards in the hope that Edwards would correct him and remind him of their prayer breakfast (or other insignificant meeting), thereby allowing Cheney to make more hay out of the ironic fact that when they did meet, it still wasn’t in the Senate. The fact that Edwards himself either didn’t remember meeting Cheney (althought his wife did) or chose not to respond scuttled Cheney’s clever ploy.
Remember, Cheney is far more intelligent that most of the posters to this thread (yosemite being the likely exception ) and he thinks on levels several layers removed from theirs. This would explain the seeming disconnect between why Cheney would say such a thing when it was not so when the fact that it was could be so easily verified, or why he didn’t add a qualifier such as “to the best of my recollection.”
) and he thinks on levels several layers removed from theirs. This would explain the seeming disconnect between why Cheney would say such a thing when it was not so when the fact that it was could be so easily verified, or why he didn’t add a qualifier such as “to the best of my recollection.”