A January 23, 2004 article at CNN.com quotes Dick Cheney defending Haliburton as a great company and that Democrat candidates for office who suggest that he showed favor to the company he used to be the CEO for are just "desperate". The article, itself, is incredibly biased (I can be biased, I'm not a journalist and don't claim to be unbiased as all journalists and news organizations do by default), and clearly casts Cheney as a guy sticking up for his palls. It allows two huge quotes from Cheney to be unbroken in the first two paragraphs of the article itself. To the article's credit, it does explain in the paragraph
after those quotes that:
Halliburton's work in postwar Iraq -- much of which it won in a no-bid contract process -- has come under criticism and scrutiny because of the firm's ties to Cheney, who headed the company between serving as Defense secretary in the first Bush administration and becoming vice president.
Which is fine, except that after you read the first two paragraphs before it, your average Joe is going to stop reading because he's had an opportunity to be convinced by Cheney that Haliburton deserved to "win" the job.
From the CNN.com article:
Offering a spirited defense of the company he once headed, Vice President Dick Cheney said Halliburton Co. is being maligned for its work in Iraq by political opponents of the Bush administration who are "feeling desperate."
Yeah, so, don't describe him as "coming to his own defense" (seeing as HE was the one being accused of wrongdoing) give him spirit. People love spirit!
Here is the beginning of the first two huge quotes:
"The company is a great company. They do great work for the federal government, as well as for their customers around the world," he told Fox News Radio in an interview Wednesday.
I'm sure a LOT of companies who provide the same services as Haliburton do good work, but we'd never know it since they were never given the chance to
even bid on any Iraq jobs!! Another thing: So, we have a right-leaning CNN.com article quoting Cheney on a righter-leaning
Fox News radio interview.
Love that bias! More from those two quotes:
"They've had now, I believe, some 15 people killed -- either Halliburton employees or subcontractors working for them."
Yeah, I think the USMil has had a few more than that, not to mention all of the other companies who have lost civilian workers over there and definitely not to mention the 10,000 Iraqi civilians who lost their lives thanks to the Iraq Attack. CHENEY, that's got NOTHING to do with it, all right? STOP trying to illicit sympathy for a company you blatantly favored by invoking the lives lost by employees of that company. That's pretty damned disgusting, if you ask me.
More from those two quotes:
"They are operating in a combat zone. They're rendering great service, and they make about three cents on the dollar for it."
What does that even mean? Are you trying to suggest the USGov is getting a good deal by using some BS phrasing? "Three cents on the dollar?" On WHAT dollar? What absurd fianancial slight-of-hand is this?
Cheney goes ON:
"This is not the most profitable part of their business portfolio, by any means."
If they're losing 97 cents on the dollar (??) why are they doing it then? Doesn't this show that they are a financially stupid company, making some seriously bad business choices? Or is it that they're just doing it as a favor for their ex-CEO?
Even more from those two quotes:
"They do it because they're good at it, because they won the contract to do it."
They won the contract?? THEY WON THE CONTRACT???
Tell me something , Dick, when you're running in a race-- heh, sorry, not when
you run in a race -- when a
runner runs in a race and makes it to the finish line, is it still considered a "win" if
there was no one else in the race??? Because that's, what happened.
The Bush 43 Admin handed Haliburton an oil firefighting contract without taking a single bid from anyone else OR Haliburton!And one last chunk of the two huge quotes from Cheney:
"And, frankly, the company takes a certain amount of pride in rendering this kind of service to U.S. military forces."
Ah, yes. Invoke their patriotism! Very nice.
"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary , 'patriotism' is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first." -- Ambrose Bierce'Nuff said.
Read the above mentioned CNN.com article.Read more about that no-bid process that "won" Haliburton the job at CommonDreams.Org.