Good thing Gore invented the internetFollow

What I really liked was someone else in the campaign pretty much immediately calling it a "boneheaded joke by a staffer".

Whether it was a joke or not at least they're aware of how it could play.

Hey, hey, hey, what's with all this dinigrating commentary about poodles?

Totem's poodle Schatzi

Three points:

1. McCain didn't claim to have "created" or "invented" the Blackberry, only helped regulate the industries that allow blackberry-like devices to do what they do. Gore did claim to have "created" the internet. That's a pretty significant distinction.

2. The claim in this case wasn't made by McCain at all. It was made by a staffer. And again. Let me stress that when he held up the blackberry, he wasn't saying that McCain made that item. He was talking about the regulations that allow those types of communication devices to operate. That's just as significant as it was in point number 1.

3. When McCain heard about it, he laughed and clarified that he wasn't actually saying anything of the sort. When Gore's claim appeared in the public, he first tried to brush it off, then tried to hide it, then basically ignored it. It's pretty universally acknowledged that had Gore simply clarified that he was referring only to legislation that helped with the creation of the internet and not the physical or design itself, the issue would have disappeared as quickly as this story will.


Honestly, Gore's contribution to the "creation" of the internet is pretty much exactly analogous to McCains contribution to the creation of bandwidth allocation regulations for communication devices while serving on that committee. The key difference is that Gore did personally author legislation in the case of the internet, while McCain was just one member of a committee in terms of handheld communication regulations. We can assume that legislation did come out of the committee, and that McCain had a hand in it, so this is really only a difference of degrees really.


Um... It still comes down to audacity I suppose. The issue with Gore was never really about the veracity of the claim, but the self-aggrandizing nature of it. Gore was exaggerating his role, McCain tends to downplay his. I suppose some people are going to be more impressed by one or the other approach depending on their own personalities...

Saying that your candidate did "this" while holding up a freaking Blackberry isn't aggrandizement? FYI: Research in Motion is based in Canada, not the US.

If John McCain being on the Commerce committee gives him technology experience, then why doesn't Obama being on the foreign relations committee give him foreign policy experience?



Edited, Sep 16th 2008 7:07pm by catwho

You expect any of us to believe that McCain knew what a Blackberry was? The rest of your post, fine, but this stretches incredulity a bit too far.

Nexa

Does he even know how to use a blackberry?

I believe blackberries require special gloves to handle, and you have to boil them a bit longer to make jam from them. So yeah, McCain isn't up to snuff on that.

He never claimed to have invented the Internet. The quotation that led to the Wired article that started this nonsense was: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." He was referring to helping create a legislative and regulatory environment that fostered the expansion and growth of the Internet.

He has been a supporter of the development of IT since the 1970s, especially during his time in Congress, though his most famous contribution was with the 1991 Gore Act, which provided the funding used by the NCSA to develop Mosaic, the first general purpose graphical web browser which was one of the defining moments in the advancement of the Internet.

Gore is usually cited as one of the legislative founders in Internet history essays. No, he didn't "invent" it, and it does sound like a dumb thing to say when taken out of context, because no one person invented it. It's been a team effort since the super early days of ARPA Net.

Gore's from Carthage. Know where that is? Yeah, no one does, haha.

It's actually pretty close to where I was born. He's just a good ole boy.

I do know where Carthage is.

Hell, I know where Finger, and Only, and Bucksnort are.