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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

So when does this start to get the Al Gore treatment?
Posted by Jill | 11:31 AM
Remember when Al Gore said that he "took the initiative in creating the internet" and the media proceeded to flog "Al Gore claims he invented the internet" every freaking minute throughout the 2000 campaign?

Here's the context of Gore's statement and what he actually said:
BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now. Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

GORE: Well, I will be offering - I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.
But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. 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.


Al Gore will be haunted by his clumsy wording until the end of his days.

Now will the same thing happen to John McCain, now that his campaign is claiming he invented the Blackberry?

Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."


Imagine that. Not only did John McCain invent the Blackberry, but he invented telecommunications, which in McCain world, didn't exist until fifteen years ago. I guess all that stuff you learned in elementary school about Alexander Graham Bell was just a multicultural liberal communist plot to smear John McCain.

I worked for a short time in the early 1980's in a place that had a machine called a Qwip. To "send a Qwip" you would wrap a piece of thermal transfer paper around a cylinder in a machine that was connected to an acoustic coupler. You would dial the other party's "Qwip number" and when you heard what we now know as "the fax sound", you'd put the receiver of the phone into the acoustic coupler and push a button. The cylinder would turn, and an arm would etch, line by line, the image being sent over the phone. To "receive a Qwip", you would wait for the phone to ring and then do the same thing.

That was maybe 1981 -- twenty-seven years ago. By the math of the world I live in, 27 is greater than 15. But in John McCain's world, they must use a different method of counting.

UPDATE: AP gets in on the fun as well.

(h/t)

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4 Comments:
Blogger D. said...
I'm amazed that no one claims McCain invented the flip phone.

Oh, wait, that was Star Trek.

Never mind.
9/16/08, 12:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
There is literary precedent for such nonsense:

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four frequently notes where Party propaganda oft claimed that the Party had invented helicopters and airplanes, adding "one generation more, and they will claim [the Party had invented] the steam engine."
9/16/08, 4:42 PM  
Blogger dguzman said...
No, no, no, Brilliant One. He actually invented the fruit blackberry. It was one of the great things he did during his childhood 5,550 years ago, when he and the earth were young. Later, however, when he was a POW (you DID know he was a POW, right?), they denied him blackberries or any other fruits. Commie bastidds.
9/16/08, 4:54 PM  
Anonymous Mike said...
Poor Al Gore. People will always give him a hard time for claiming to have created the internet. We make mistakes ourselves with what we say. we are not however held accountable like politicians are.
9/22/12, 7:49 PM  
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