The lies
DICK SAYS: He never met Edwards.
THE TRUTH: They met at least thrice.
DICK SAYS: Edwards' hometown newspaper has "taken to calling [Edwards] Senator Gone."
THE TRUTH: The name appeared in one editorial in the Southern Pines Pilot, a small weekly magazine. The epithet did not appear in Edwards' hometown newspaper.
DICK SAYS: He's "up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session."
THE TRUTH: Over the last four years he has presided over the Senate twice.
Update [2004-10-7 5:21:57 by Fleischer]: The official defense is "But he dines with Republican senators on a weekly basis!" I guess Cheney felt that Edwards was a slacker for not gatecrashing those Republican dinners.
There's more. Lots more.
DICK SAYS: 900,000 small businesses would be hit by KE'04 rollback of tax cuts.
THE TRUTH: According to CNN the real number is half of that - and half of those businesses comprise only of a single owner.
Update [2004-10-7 5:21:57 by Fleischer]: Kevin Drum says (in a similar exercise to this one) that Cheney's number is for individuals with business income and that only 72,000 businesses with employees would be affected adversely. He points out that more small businesses and people with business income would get tax cuts under Kerry's plan. FactCheck.org offers a longer explanation.
DICK SAYS: He observed free elections in El Salvador two decades ago.
THE TRUTH: One side in El Salvador's civil war was excluded from the process.
DICK SAYS: Edwards' claim that the US has incurred 90 percent of coalition casualties and 90 percent of the costs of the effort in Iraq is "just dead wrong".
THE TRUTH: Cheney counts Iraqi casualties as coalition casualties and debt forgiveness by non-coalition countries as contributions toward the coalition effort. (Also, the current debt forgiveness proposal isn't as generous as Cheney claimed it to be.)
DICK SAYS: He never asserted connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
THE TRUTH: Cheney has done so repeatedly. In September 2003 he described Iraq as "the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
DICK SAYS: FactCheck.com (sic) shows Edwards' accusations against Halliburton to be false.
THE TRUTH: FactCheck.org - the website Cheney obviously meant - doesn't address Edwards' claims.
Update [2004-10-7 5:21:57 by Fleischer]: FactCheck.org weighs in: Cheney "wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making". In fact, Edwards "was mostly right."
DICK SAYS: The troops "wouldn't have what they have today" if Edwards and Kerry had had their way.
THE TRUTH: If Kerry and Edwards had had their way, a different version of the $87 billion bill would have been passed and the troops would have had at least the same things as they have now.
DICK SAYS: The Gulf War 1991 coalition wasn't far stronger than this one.
THE TRUTH: He must have been joking. Yeah, that's the ticket. He was joking.
Arguable misrepresentations
DICK SPINS: They have "never let up on Osama bin Laden from day one" and have "actively and aggressively pursued him."
THE OTHER SIDE: Bush told a reporter he wasn't bothered by what bin Laden was up to. He moved troops out of Afghanistan into Iraq. He let Afghan warlords go after bin Laden instead of highly trained American troops.
DICK SPINS: They have made significant progress in Iraq.
THE OTHER SIDE: Lately the violence in Iraq has been escalating. The country is still less safe than it was under Saddam Hussein.
DICK SPINS: Iraqis will have free elections next January for the first time in history.
THE OTHER SIDE: We don't know whether they will have free elections. It's possible that the elections won't be held in areas controlled by the rebels.
DICK SPINS: Iraq is where the terrorists are most likely to "come together with weapons of mass destruction, the deadly technologies that Saddam Hussein had developed and used over the years."
THE OTHER SIDE: Saddam Hussein of course had no weapons of mass destruction and Iraq was hardly a focal point of global terrorism. US ally Pakistan, for example, is a more likely place for the sort of meeting Cheney envisions.
DICK SPINS: We know Zarqawi is "still in Baghdad today".
THE OTHER SIDE: How do we know that?
DICK SPINS: Kerry and Edwards voted for No Child Left Behind, but are now against it.
THE OTHER SIDE: Kerry and Edwards are criticizing the Bush administration's implementation of it, not the bill itself.
DICK SPINS: Kerry opposed certain weapons systems after the Cold War had ended.
THE OTHER SIDE: So did Cheney.
DICK SPINS: 10 million voters have registered to vote in Afghanistan.
THE OTHER SIDE: The number reflects widespread voter registration fraud in certain areas of Afghanistan.
Update [2004-10-7 5:21:57 by Fleischer]: DICK SPINS: Kerry voted for tax increases 98 times.
THE OTHER SIDE: According to FactCheck.org, 43 of the votes "were cast on budget measures that only set targets and don't actually legislate tax increases. Often, Several votes are counted regarding a single tax bill."
What am I missing? Any mistakes?
(There's a similar diary here).