PrintSoros plays games with the factcheck website
George Soros seems to have pulled a pretty interesting fast one, following Tuesday's vice—presidential debate. At that event, Vice President Dick Cheney recommended that viewers go to www.factcheck.org to authenticate provable Kerry campaign inaccuracies. But The American Thinker has discovered something else. Any viewer who doesn't quite remember the name of the Web site or absent—mindedly types in www.factcheck.com is headed for a direct trip to George Soros' own droning blog site (which hasn't got a single fact on it).
Soros' Web log is not even a week old, but apparently his minions know how to quickly load it with different, and unrelated, domain names. That appears the case with factcheck.com. A Google search of 'factcheck' shows that the factcheck.com domain (The Leading Education Site on the Net, so the Google header lists) was a totally blank sheet when Google cached it at 7:21 GMT on Oct. 5, 2004, well before the debate. Since the debate, it's become part of Soros' blog.
Here are the Google search results I got:
FactCheck.org — Annenberg Political Fact Check
Latest FactCheck Articles ... FactCheck.org will send each new FactCheck and Special
Report directly to your mailbox (disable pop—up blocker first). Sign Up Now. ...
www.factcheck.org/ — 8k — Oct 4, 2004 — Cached — Similar pages
FactCheck.org Republican—funded Group Attacks Kerry's War Record
FactCheck.org — Annenberg Political Fact Check, ...
www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=231 — 50k — Cached — Similar pages
[ More results from www.factcheck.org ]
ABCNEWS.com : Sept. 11 Rumors: Fact or Fiction?
The Sesame Street character Bert, lower right, showed up on posters of Osama bin Laden in Bangladesh after a printer downloaded a joke picture from the Internet ...
abcnews.go.com/onair/DailyNews/factcheck.html — 42k — Cached — Similar pages
factcheck.com: The Leading Education Site on the Net
factcheck.com/ — 1k — Oct 5, 2004 — Cached — Similar pages
'Fast one' is quite literal here, but it's still pretty pathetic. Since this resembles phishing, one can't help but think of George Soros as some carnival barker who has managed through trickery to escort the unsuspecting mark to step right into his parlor. As P.T. Barnum reputedly said: 'There's a sucker born every minute.' I suppose Soros thinks he's going to persuade people by gulling them to his site. But given the boring quality of his blog, he's probably desperate for hits.
UPDATE: The excellent INDC Journal website beat us to this story, and has follow—up reader comments worth reading. Credit where it is due.
CORRECTION: This story incorrectly stated Vice President Dick Cheney referred debate listeners to factcheck.org. Cheney referred debate listeners to factcheck.com.
Clarification: Since the item ran, a statement on the GeorgeSoros.com Web site declares there was no involvement with the routing of factcheck.com to GeorgeSoros.com.
