McCain Helped Create the Blackberry?

I think we're still in that "silly season" of politics Barack Obama recently referenced during that whole "lipstick on a pig" saga.

"AP: Adviser says McCain helped create the BlackBerry (LOL! OMG!)" That's the title of one of the e-mails sent out by Obama's campaign today.

Waving his BlackBerry personal digital assistant and citing John McCain's work as a senator, top McCain policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters today: "He did this ... 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."

Another McCain aide later dismissed the remark as "a boneheaded joke by a staffer" and said McCain actually laughed when he heard about it.

Of course now McCain is being compared to Al Gore, who, in 2000, bragged about "taking the initiative to create the Internet" through technological and educational policies. In the media frenzy that followed, those words turned into how he claimed to have "invented the Internet," which he never said.

Holtz-Eakin was trying to make the point that McCain's leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee put him at the forefront of a number of economic interests, including the telecommunications industry.

"He would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer," senior McCain aide Matt McDonald told AP.

The Obama camp gleefully jumped on this gaffe, particularly given McCain's lack of tech-savvyness, sending out three e-mails about it to reporters.

From Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton: "If John McCain hadn't said that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' on the day of one of our nation's worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week."