Factcheck Wednesday: Character Flaw Anyone?

In a dramatic if petty statement that the talking heads loved, Dick Cheney managed to package two lies in a distortion, when he said that Edwards was absent from the Senate so much his hometown paper took to calling him Senator Gone, and that Cheney presides over the Senate "most Tuesdays" for the past 3+years and had never met Edwards.
1. It wasn't The hometown paper, but a small weekly, which had published one editorial months ago with an aside about Edwards, though it noted that he had a better attendance record for someone running in the primaries than his opponents, and that he hadn't missed a vote of consequence.

2. Cheney met Edwards on at least two other occasions, and there's a photo going around of the two of them sitting side by side.
Both since Cheney has been v.p.

3. the most egregious lie of the bunch: In the past 3 + years Cheney has presided over the Senate on exactly two Tuesdays. So has John Edwards. (The presiding officer job is rotated when the v.p. isn't there, which apparently is most of the time.) It's possible he forgot meeting Edwards, but this "most Tuesdays" is just a flat out lie, which makes his whole point based on lies.

Here are the facts:

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.

The media pilloried Al Gore in 2000 for a few minor misstatements and called it evidence of a character flaw.

Other postdebate chatter:
Instant polls showed Edwards did better with undecided voters, independents and voters in swing states. Which supports our observation that he was successful in targeting key constituencies.

The CNN political analyst made an interesting point: that the Bushie strategy is to make Kerry the issue, not an up or down vote on the Bush administration, and that Bush (or "The President") was mentioned fewer times than Kerry in the vp debate. There's a grain of truth is in this observation. While Edwards successfully took it to the Bush-Cheney administration, the advice to Kerry to turn every question to a criticism of Bush in the next debate has some merit. The strategy would depend however on using a few succinct words as self-defense before going on the attack. For instance, if Kerry deflected Bush criticism of him as not supporting the military, Kerry could say something like: General X, Admiral Y and xx other distinguished military leaders support me, and I don't think they would if they believed I didn't stand for a strong defense. And then attack Bush.