Re: OT: It's Time for President Bush to Resign

Mo chaz ejaculates:
"GORE: During my service in the United States Congress, I took the
initiative in creating the Internet.
" flake, you look like a lying sack of *** now too"
-

Much of this turns on the repube substitution of "invent", we all
have a concensus connotation of what "invent" means, but this is NOT
what he said.

If we're picking nits, when did the "internet" begin ? The term was
in use as early as 1973, but the "reality of it" didn't happen for most
people until after Mosaic, (graphical interface), and even as late as
'95 I would think only a small percentage were online. In my mind the
internet as we know it started in '83-'84, with the creation of TCP/IP
and the Domain Naming System.

But I digress : what is the truth about Gore and the internet ? He
started supporting it in '78, ( at least ), and:

But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do
to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice
president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the
Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States
without the strong support given to it and related research areas by
the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as
Senator."

The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with
making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's
High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave
Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is
today."

Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University,
claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the
importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to
cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"

Why did Gore's comment provoke no reaction when he first said it ?
Perhaps because Blitzer and others knew that Gore had taken the
leadership, within the Congress, in developing what we now call the
Internet. Gore was explicitly discussing his achievements in Congress,
and if "I took the initiative" meant "I took the leadership,"
his statement was perfectly accurate. (Extemporaneous speech doesn't
always parse perfectly. Everyone in Washington knows this.) Indeed, as
Gore's remark began attracting wide scrutiny, some journalists
reviewed his congressional record-and a wide array of Internet
pioneers described his key role, within the Congress, in creating what
we now call the Net. In the March 21 Washington Post, for example,
Jason Schwartz quoted several Internet pioneers, including Vinton Cerf,
the man often called "the father of the Internet." Cerf praised
Gore's role in the Net's development. "I think it is very fair to
say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States
without the strong support given to it and related research areas by
the vice president," he said. Meanwhile, Katie Hafner, author of a
book on the Internet's origins, penned a short piece in the New York
Times, quoting experts who said that Gore "helped lift the Internet
from relative obscurity and turn it into a widely accessible,
commercial network." On March 18, Gore tried to clarify his remark in
an interview with USA Today. "I did take the lead in the Congress,"
he told Chuck Raasch; he described his Internet work in detail. Raasch
quoted Gore's explanation-but it was mentioned in no other paper.

How well-known was Gore's leadership role? The press corps was
full of experienced scribes who knew all about his work in this area.
We'll let the Nexis archives guide us as we review this familiar old
tale. According to Nexis, the Washington Post's first reference to
the Internet occurred in November 1988; a "virus" had attacked the
little-known network, which connected some 50,000 computers, the Post
said. But as journalists began to report on the Net, Gore's key role
in its development was clear. One month later, for example, Martin
Walker wrote this in The Guardian:

WALKER (12/30/88): American computing scientists are campaigning for
the creation of a "superhighway" which would revolutionise data
transmission.

Legislation has already been laid before Congress by Senator Albert
Gore of Tennessee, calling for government funds to help establish the
new network, which scientists say they can have working within five
years, at a cost of Dollars 400 million.
Nine months later, the Post reported that the Bush administration
"plans to unveil tomorrow an ambitious plan to spend nearly $2
billion enhancing the nation's technological know-how, including the
creation of a high-speed data 'superhighway' that would link more
than 1,000 research sites around the country." This network was
"comparable to an interstate highway system for electronic data,"
the paper said-and it noted that "a similar plan has been proposed
by Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), whose legislation also proposes creating
a vast electronic library that could be accessed by users seeking
federally gathered information." Simply put, Gore's leadership role
had been widely reported-and was thoroughly understood in the press.
How well known was Gore's work in this area? Five years later, the
Internet was becoming well known, and the Washingtonian's Alison
Schneider looked back on its years of development:

SCHNEIDER (12/94): Internet. There's no escaping it. It seems like
only yesterday that Al Gore was preaching the merits of the I-way to a
nation that still thought the Net was something used only for catching
butterflies.
Duh! Within the press corps, everyone knew that Gore was the leader,
within the Congress, in creating what we now call the Net. Indeed, by
the time of the 2000 election, even one of Gore's long-standing foes
was praising his work in this area. On September 1, 2000, former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed the American Political Science
Association. His remarks were broadcast on C-SPAN:

GINGRICH: In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long
time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore
is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make
sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is-and I worked with
him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a
"futures group"-the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the
world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen.
Gingrich knew what Gore had done. Indeed, Gore and Gingrich had almost
been friendly rivals in these technological areas. Their leadership
roles had long been clear. In 1995, for example, the New York Times'
Peter Lewis attended a national cyberspace conference, where he
interviewed a group of Gingrich supporters. "A number of participants
said Mr. Gingrich had effectively seized the mantel of top Government
cyberspace visionary from Vice President Al Gore, who is credited with
creating the phrase 'information superhighway,'" Lewis wrote.
Long before the press corps ginned up the Internet flap, Lewis'
statement reflected what everyone knew-that Gore had enjoyed a
long-standing reign as the government's King of the Net.

Had Gore misstated his role to Blitzer? This notion would be
aggressively bruited throughout Campaign 2000, but you had to work very
hard to tease a lie out of Gore's statement. Gore had said this:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative
in creating the Internet. Gingrich said this: Gore is the person who,
in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to
an Internet. It's hard to torture a difference from that pair of
statements, and a Gore biographer, the Post's David Maraniss, seemed
to complete the Rule of Three. In August 2000, Maraniss said this on
CNN's Reliable Sources: "Gore really was instrumental in developing
the Internet. He was the one congressman who understood the whole thing
in the '70s, when no other congressman gave a darn about it." Had
Gore misrepresented his leadership role? Only those determined to make
him a liar would have drawn that tendentious conclusion. Unfortunately,
many journalists were eager to do that-a fact which would become
crystal clear.


This will probably be the last time I respond to one of your posts
mo: the childish exhuberance with which you display your ignorance is
quite tiresome.....


Serenity,
Tranquility, and Peace,

E.L.

"Yum ! yummy nits ! ( but I'm always hungry an hour later....) "

.

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