McCain helped to create the blackberry…Right.

I stumbled on this article today and I must admit it’s hilarious:

John McCain doesn’t use e-mail. So it was downright odd to see one of his aides hold up a BlackBerry on Tuesday and claim that the Arizona senator somehow deserves credit for its existence.

“He did this,” economic policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters, referring to a BlackBerry, according to a report on Politico.com. “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.”

This may join the ranks of the-Internet-is-too-hard-to-use statements personally made by the Republican candidate, including this remarkable admission from July: “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need–including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.”

And then there was the rather sad claim, captured on video, from a campaign representative that “John McCain is aware of the Internet.” Plus McCain’s statement early this year that: “I am an illiterate that has to rely on my wife” for the Internet, presumably meaning such taxing matters as visiting a Web site.

Holtz-Eakin’s unfortunate improvisation is likely to add to the narrative of a presidential candidate out of touch with technology, just as Al Gore’s improvident boast about “creating” the Internet reinforced suspicions that the vice president liked to exaggerate his accomplishments.

[...]

The McCain campaign fell into that trap this week. If Gore could take credit for “creating” the Internet, then why can’t ex-Senate Commerce Committee Chairman McCain claim credit for “creating” the BlackBerry, never mind that it was developed by a Canadian company? Or Wi-Fi, which the McCain campaign also seemed to do this week? Or, for that matter, every computer and technological gadget used today? McCain, the father of the iPhone, anyone?

Of course the adviser wasn’t referring to the BlackBerry itself, but it doesn’t change the fact that John McCain isn’t aware of what’s happening in the technology world today and I guess it wasn’t that different 15 years ago…

Oh and there’s also the fact that Research In Motion is a Canadian company.