I've been reading the Voice less and less these days, but this morning I decided to check out its debate coverage. Not as bad as MSNBC last night, but still
pretty awful.
Here are the opening graphs of Ridgeway's piece:
Dick Cheney was every inch the president so many accuse him of being in Tuesday night's debate. Unlike the stumbling George Bush of last week's contest, the vice president turned aside John Edwards's attacks by simply saying the senator didn't know what he was talking about. Cheney hammered the Kerry-Edwards ticket as having a record of being inconsistent and duplicitous. He painted Edwards and John Kerry as having been AWOL for Senate votes, and as two insignificant con men not worth talking to or about.
In doing so, Cheney may well have rescued Bush from losing any further support in the polls. He gave no ground to Edwards and successfully stuck to the tried-and-true politician's answer to any and all accusations: Stonewall and repeat your position over and over, no matter how ridicuous.
Here's what I wrote. Write you own. You may want to focus on Ridgeway's lack of fact-checking on Cheney's statements. If he'd checked a few facts, I think Ridgeway, who isn't our enemy by any means, would be doing better than a piss-poor job of being our friend this morning.
James Ridgeway analyzed the Edwards-Cheney debate as follows: "Unlike the stumbling George Bush of last week's contest, the vice president turned aside John Edwards's attacks by simply saying the senator didn't know what he was talking about." Perhaps he watched a different debate than I did, as I don't recall Cheney doing a very good job of rebuting his own record in the House: Cheney is, as Edwards said, a main who voted against Martin Luther King Day, against Meals on Wheels, against Head Start, and for keeping Nelson Mandela in prison. If Cheney's goal was to convince America that he's not as evil as we suspect he is, he lost, terribly.