He Also Invented the Question Mark

When questioned last week by reporters about Sen. John McCain's role on the United States Senate Commerce Committee, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor for McCain's presidential campaign, highlighted his boss's experience by pulling a BlackBerry from his suit jacket pocket and saying "[McCain] did this. The premier innovation in the past fifteen years comes right through the Commerce Committee. You're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create and that's what he did."

In an attempt to recover from Holtz-Eakin's ridiculous claim, Matt McDonald, a senior aide to McCain declared that "[McCain] would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer." "Boneheaded" is the perfect description because McCain does not know how to use a computer or send e-mail, one of the BlackBerry's primary functions. Amazingly the supposedly liberal media did not pounce on Holtz-Eakin and his comment as they did when Al Gore stated "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" before his 2000 presidential campaign. And although Gore is obviously not involved in the presidential race and he made that comment more than nine years ago, I still feel it necessary to stand up for him with the following quotes from Internet pioneers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn: "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development...The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening...As far back as the 1970s, Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system...As a Senator in the 1980s, Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an 'Interagency Network'...The Gore sponsored High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991 supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative, which became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science...Gore provided much needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially driven operation...No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the [former] Vice President...The [former] Vice President deserves credit for his early recognition of the value of high speed computing and communication and for his long term and consistent articulation of the potential value of the Internet to American citizens and industry and, indeed, to the rest of the world." With those words from Cerf and Kahn, it is apparent that both Gore and McCain have played a part in changing the world as we know it.