'First time I met you' latest in a line of Cheney whoppers

By Josh Marshall - 10/06/04 08:00 PM ET

In one of the most pointed zingers of Tuesday night’s debate, Vice President Dick Cheney turned to Sen. John Edwards and said that even though he is the presiding officer of the body in which Edwards serves, “the first time I met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.”

It was hard to figure that Cheney and Edwards had really never met after both had served in such high-profile positions in Washington over the past four years.

And that, of course, was the point:

Cheney would hardly go so far out on a limb unless what he was saying was true. And if it was true, then Edwards must not have been very serious or diligent about his job in the Senate.

But, of course, as Democrats pointed out almost immediately, it wasn’t true.

Edwards and Cheney were there together last year at the swearing-in of North Carolina’s junior senator, Elizabeth Dole (R). And they attended a congressional prayer breakfast together in February 2001.

By yesterday morning, someone else had remembered that the two met at a taping of “Meet the Press” a few months later.

One suspects that there were probably other times the two have met as well. But within an hour of the debate’s end, Democratic rapid-response mavens were circulating a picture of Cheney and Edwards practically in physical contact at the aforementioned prayer breakfast.

And as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

In itself, it would be pretty irrelevant whether Cheney and Edwards had ever met or whether Cheney remembered their meeting. But Cheney used the alleged non-meeting as such a cudgel that Democrats were well within their rights to pillory the vice president for attacking Edwards with a claim that was just straight-up not true.

If they’re smart, Democrats will also use the non-meeting whopper as an opening to get into a whole series of other falsehoods Cheney told during the course of Tuesday night’s debate — misstatements and falsehoods that, unlike this one, are about issues critical to this election.

Take this statement of the vice president’s from Tuesday’s debate.

“I have not suggested there’s a connection between Iraq and 9-11.”

Anyone who’s followed this issue over the past three years must have had their jaw drop when Cheney let that whopper fly. Not only has Cheney repeatedly suggested that Saddam may have played some role in the Sept. 11 attacks, he has always been the administration’s most aggressive public advocate of this now long-since-discredited allegation.

As The Washington Post noted in yesterday’s edition, Cheney has repeatedly advocated the now-discredited claim that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in early 2001.

Claiming that Atta was holding secret meetings with Iraqi intelligence only months before Sept. 11 is precisely the same as suggesting a connection between Iraq and Sept. 11.

Then there are the numerous times either in speeches or on Sunday-morning talk shows when Cheney has suggested that it’s an open question whether Saddam was behind the attacks.

The most egregious case was a year ago on “Meet the Press.” When Tim Russert asked Cheney whether he was surprised that some 69 percent of Americans erroneously believed that Saddam had some connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney responded, “No. I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection.”

When Russert made the logical follow-up and asked, “But is there a connection?”

Cheney’s response was, “We just don’t know.”

Cheney then went on to recite a litany of either misleading or false claims that were designed to suggest that Saddam had a role in Sept. 11 before circling back to his original point: “We just don’t know.”

By any reasonable standard this was a brazen lie. Proving a negative is always difficult, particularly in the murky worlds of crime and international terrorism. But by the time Cheney spoke, U.S. intelligence had not found a single piece of credible intelligence linking Saddam’s government to the Sept. 11 attacks. What’s more, the United States had already put together a detailed and exacting history of how the attacks were planned, who planned them, where the money came from and where the conspirators operated. In all those details and facts and testimony, no connection with Saddam ever came up.

As I said, proving a negative is always difficult. But by any reasonable standard, we did know. And we knew that Saddam wasn’t involved. By Cheney’s standard, we also “didn’t know” whether the Jordanians or the Egyptians or, for that matter, the French, Germans or Russians were involved.

As he has so many times, Cheney was just playing with words, phrases and innuendo to deceive the people he was elected to serve. And on Tuesday night, he fibbed again about ever having made this claim.

Truth-telling about Iraq and al Qaeda is one of the best cards Sen. John Kerry and Edwards have to play in the final weeks of this campaign.

And with Tuesday night’s performance, Cheney gave them plenty of opportunities to play it.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it