(This diary is expanded from a comment I made in Devilstower's front page diary today.)
So. It was John McCain who invented the Internet, after all.
At least that's what John McCain is claiming.
At least that's what the talking heads in the media should be claiming that John McCain is claiming, with the release of this statement by McCain today:
"Under my guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology that enables Americans to surf the web while sitting at a coffee shop, airport lounge, or public park."
(more....)
And not only should the talking heads in the media be holding forth on how John McCain just claimed he invented the Internet, but also: mobile phones, Wi-Fi technology, and... Blackberries. His top economic advisor spreads the word about John McCain, tech guru:
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."
O.K. Even given the lack of modesty here, I think it's obvious to anyone with a brain stem that this is mostly a Senator claiming -- truly or falsely -- that the work he did as a legislator in the U.S. Senate helped to make some technological advances possible.
In fact, the statement is very similar to this one made by Al Gore to Wolf Blitzer in 1999, whemn Gore was running against Bill Bradley in the Democratic primary. Here it is, in context, with Blitzer asking Gore what he brought to the ticket that Bradley couldn't offer:
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.
This last paragraph statement was later morphed into the well-known Republican / media lie: "Al Gore says he invented the Internet."
Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler put together a very comprehensive history of how this total lie was started, spread with Pravda-like shamelessness by the Republican party, and then eaten up with a spoon by dishonest, complicit and / or lazy media fools like Lou Dobbs. The piece is a must-read to understand the state of politics and media in the U.S.A., and what any progressive is up against. Just one tiny part:
Indeed, Gore’s remark about the Net would become a cause celebre. Completely ignored at the time it was made, it became an iconic example of an alleged character problem—Gore’s widely-flogged “problem with the truth.” For two years, Gore would be savaged as a liar—many pundits would call him “delusional”—and his Internet comment would be Exhibit A in their endless assault on his character and integrity. But look again at what three men said, and convince yourself that it really did happen. Convince yourself that, for two solid years, Gore was denounced by the press as a liar; denounced for a comment which created no interest—none at all—in the press at the time it was made:
Al Gore, 3/9/99: During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
Newt Gingrich, 9/1/00: Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.
David Maraniss, 8/26/00: Gore really was instrumental in developing the Internet. He was the one congressman who understood the whole thing in the ’70s.
Two of these men remained major pundits. One of these men stood condemned as a liar. But so it went throughout Campaign 2000 as the press corps conducted its War Against Gore. So it went as a deeply dysfunctional press corps made a joke of your White House election.
Here were are in 2008, after disastrous eight years of George W. Bush, the man that only got into office because of a shameful, GOP-toadying Supreme Court decision that snatched the White House away from Al Gore. George W. Bush -- who personally jumped on the "Al Gore is a liar" bandwagon, and whose campaign repeated the "Al Gore says he invented the Internet" lie at every opportunity -- is finally on his way out the door, to the vast relief of most Americans.
Now, after eight disastrous years of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove -- and a servile Republican Congress that made them into kings, right here in our beloved democracy -- one of the most servile of their supporters in Congress, John McCain, makes a statement that is exactly like Al Gore's actual statement about the Internet.
Will the talking heads suddenly push John McCain's statement as a grandiose, deluded, dishonest bunch of malarkey that proves McCain can't be trusted? Will this be seen as solid evidence that John McCain does not have the character to be President, since he's a serial liar?
Ha!
Of course not.
****
P.S.: This is ONE big difference between the 1999 Al Gore statement and the 2008 John McCain statement, however, in terms of their actual work in the Senate:
Gore actually did the stuff he said.
McCain did not.
****
P.S. 2: Do you think Lou Dobbs et al. would have gone easier if he'd said that the Internet was created "under my guiding hand?" Or would he have been mocked mercilessly as a poseur, a liar, and a joke of a man?
I'm guessing the latter.