Good thing Gore invented the internetFollow

Too bad you never come back here, we could totally sip Mint Julips together.




yeah, I know, but the northern folk think it's cute.

All this talk of mint juleps, southern accents, and massive asses crammed in to too-tight pants is giving me the vapors.

That's what you southern people call getting horny, right?

Most of us also need a gun rack.

Mindel. I completely get where you're coming from on this, but I just can't let this one go:





Yeah. He kinda did. The next sentence in the quote isn't about the internet, unless you think the internet had to do with environmental protection and improvements in the education system that is. He was listing off accomplishments, one of which was "creating the internet".


It's clearly a misstatement. And a darn funny one. But it's correct for others to point it out since those who don't know the history of the internet might just take that statement at face value if no one corrects it.

Show me a similar quote from McCain claiming to have "invented the blackberry", and we might be able to say these are similar gaffs.

Wouldn't the same apply to McCain's lackey saying, "Telecommunications of the United States, the premiere innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create,”

Yes. I'm aware of it. It's a bit of a strawman though. While some certainly used the modified "invented the internet" phrase to lampoon Gore, his original statement is *also* not really correct though.

He didn't "create" the internet. Had he said that he helped it's creation, that would have been ok. If he'd said he passed legislation to do so, that would have been even more ok. But you've got to have an ego the size of Nebraska to claim to have "created the internet".

That was my real point. It's why I put both words side by side in quotes in my earlier post. To me, either claim is incorrect. Either one puts the efforts of the politician well outside the range of what he actually did. The issue here isn't whether the word "invent" or "create" was used, but the context in which it was used. Gore directly claimed to have "created the internet". A McCain staffer, when asked what McCain had done on the commerce committee, pointed to a blackberry and said: “Telecommunications of the United States, the premiere innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create ... And that’s what he did. He both regulated and de-regulated the industry.”

Again. Three massive differences:

1. He's clearly talking about telecommunications regulation, not building the devices themselves.

2. He's not saying that McCain did it all by himself, but that he "helped create" them.

3. He's not McCain.


The Obama camp of course immediately jumped on the same strawman you're saying is important to distinguish. They said that McCain claimed to have "invented the BlackBerry". So. If it's wrong to switch the word "create" with "invent", then is it not doubly wrong to do that *and* then attribute the claim to someone else?




No. He really didn't though. He said he "created the internet", a wholly false statement. He was involved in pursuing legislation that helped it grow. But that's not even vaguely in the same league. The internet likely would have come to be whether Al Gore had ever entered politics or not. Gore is a political opportunist. He latches onto ideas that are coming down the pipe but aren't yet broadly covered in the media and pushes them hard so that people think they were his. DARPA and ARPANET were around quite a bit before he got into this area. Home computers were being built as well. The infrastructure of the internet was already in place. The only thing that would have stopped its formation was if the government actually added regulation to prevent it. So Gore being a champion of new technology certainly helped, but was hardly a creative force.


One can argue that the single event that "created" what we now call the internet was the adoption of TCP/IP as the standard communication protocol across all networks. I'm not aware that Gore had any role at all in this. And the decision to adopt TCP/IP was such an obvious one that it's unclear if any action for or against it would have changed this at all. So he didn't "create" the original networks (email was around 3 years before he took his first political office just to give you an idea how off this is), and he didn't have a hand in the core change that "created" a single large "internet".

I just think that even the word "create" is a gross exaggeration of his role here. Helped grow? Sure. Helped to prevent over-regulation? Sure. Tossed some funding it's way? Absolutely. But "created"? Not in even the most twisted stretch of the term did he "create" the internet.

But everybody knows Blackberrys aren't cool at all with out being able to access the internets.

Gore > McCain

Actually, his childhood was split between the two. He lived in Carthage when Congress wasn't in session, and in DC when it was.

It's just shameful.

No.

Been there, done that. No admin response.

Feel free to bump it from page 3.

Edited, Sep 18th 2008 8:29pm by Paskil