Thursday, October 07, 2004
Really Important Debate Points
Thomas Oliphant has a column in the Boston Globe about the VP debate that is ripe for a fisking. (Comments in italics.)
Here we go:
Today, however, he is explaining all the occasions in and out of the Senate when the two were in fact together - many of them recited with great glee to a cheering crowd by Elizabeth Edwards at a post-debate rally.
OK, they have met before. Cheney was wrong and he'll get slapped for it. But could Oliphant explain why Edwards didn't point this out? If he did not remember the meetings, why would we expect Cheney to remember them? The point was that Edwards has a weak voting record. From my knowledge pre-debate, he does have a weak record.
If you want to talk records, he obliged by listing some of Cheney's most bizarre decisions as a member of the House of Representatives: one of 10 members (out of 435) to vote against Head Start, one of four to oppose banning plastic weapons designed to fool metal detectors, against money for the Meals on Wheels program for senior citizens, against a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and against a resolution calling for the release of then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
So Cheney is a Conservative. Shocking. This is not new. But it is a fair debating point.
The reason behind Cheney's dramatic misstatement of an easily verifiable fact is revealing.
Really? Then what was it? Oliphant never gives us a reason.
In the preceding exchange Edwards had the temerity to raise the issue that drives Cheney nuts - Halliburton, the continuously in-trouble conglomerate Cheney used to run and still gets lucrative deferred compensation from.
True. But Oliphant could have mentioned that the compensation is fixed and therefore uneffected by Haliburton’s current government contracts.
Edwards cited more specific, and verifiable concerns. One of them happened to be the fact that nearly half the $20 billion portion of the bill targeted for ''reconstruction'' was a $7.5 billion, no-bid contract for Halliburton.
Halliburton is just about the only company that does this work. “No-bid” is a meaningless word if there is no one else that can do the work. In Bosnia they had one competitor for the contract, and the Clinton administration chose Halliburton. There just isn’t any other company that can do this kind of work. And until we invade a few more countries and create a market for nation building there won’t be any new companies to do this work. If elected Kerry/Edwards will make some show about sticking it to Halliburton. And then they will quietly call them back. They won’t have any better options.
The second mention came in response to a fudged Cheney answer to a question from moderator Gwen Ifill noting his opposition while he was Halliburton CEO to US sanctions against terrorism-supporting, nuclear weapons-developing Iran.
Cheney fudged the issue by ''explaining'' that his opposition was to unilateral sanctions, not the current, international penalties Iran faces that may even be increased.
This is the same reasoning Cheney used to defend his votes against sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s. You may not agree with the reasoning but it doesn’t seem to be a lie or part of a sinister plot to increase Halliburton profits. Unless of course, he had the Halliburton job secured in a secret deal made in 1975 between President Ford, the fat cats at Halliburton, Donald Rumsfeld, and the disembodied spirit of Howard Hughes. I bet Nixon was in on it.
The rest of the article consists of a series of shots at Halliburton. Why are these relevant? The administration has had four years of history to screw up. So Edwards decides to attack the Vice-President’s business career. Good call. He should have gone after the mess in Iraq. Oh except Edwards voted for it, and supported it in his early primary campaign.
Here we go:
Today, however, he is explaining all the occasions in and out of the Senate when the two were in fact together - many of them recited with great glee to a cheering crowd by Elizabeth Edwards at a post-debate rally.
OK, they have met before. Cheney was wrong and he'll get slapped for it. But could Oliphant explain why Edwards didn't point this out? If he did not remember the meetings, why would we expect Cheney to remember them? The point was that Edwards has a weak voting record. From my knowledge pre-debate, he does have a weak record.
If you want to talk records, he obliged by listing some of Cheney's most bizarre decisions as a member of the House of Representatives: one of 10 members (out of 435) to vote against Head Start, one of four to oppose banning plastic weapons designed to fool metal detectors, against money for the Meals on Wheels program for senior citizens, against a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and against a resolution calling for the release of then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
So Cheney is a Conservative. Shocking. This is not new. But it is a fair debating point.
The reason behind Cheney's dramatic misstatement of an easily verifiable fact is revealing.
Really? Then what was it? Oliphant never gives us a reason.
In the preceding exchange Edwards had the temerity to raise the issue that drives Cheney nuts - Halliburton, the continuously in-trouble conglomerate Cheney used to run and still gets lucrative deferred compensation from.
True. But Oliphant could have mentioned that the compensation is fixed and therefore uneffected by Haliburton’s current government contracts.
Edwards cited more specific, and verifiable concerns. One of them happened to be the fact that nearly half the $20 billion portion of the bill targeted for ''reconstruction'' was a $7.5 billion, no-bid contract for Halliburton.
Halliburton is just about the only company that does this work. “No-bid” is a meaningless word if there is no one else that can do the work. In Bosnia they had one competitor for the contract, and the Clinton administration chose Halliburton. There just isn’t any other company that can do this kind of work. And until we invade a few more countries and create a market for nation building there won’t be any new companies to do this work. If elected Kerry/Edwards will make some show about sticking it to Halliburton. And then they will quietly call them back. They won’t have any better options.
The second mention came in response to a fudged Cheney answer to a question from moderator Gwen Ifill noting his opposition while he was Halliburton CEO to US sanctions against terrorism-supporting, nuclear weapons-developing Iran.
Cheney fudged the issue by ''explaining'' that his opposition was to unilateral sanctions, not the current, international penalties Iran faces that may even be increased.
This is the same reasoning Cheney used to defend his votes against sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s. You may not agree with the reasoning but it doesn’t seem to be a lie or part of a sinister plot to increase Halliburton profits. Unless of course, he had the Halliburton job secured in a secret deal made in 1975 between President Ford, the fat cats at Halliburton, Donald Rumsfeld, and the disembodied spirit of Howard Hughes. I bet Nixon was in on it.
The rest of the article consists of a series of shots at Halliburton. Why are these relevant? The administration has had four years of history to screw up. So Edwards decides to attack the Vice-President’s business career. Good call. He should have gone after the mess in Iraq. Oh except Edwards voted for it, and supported it in his early primary campaign.
