The sheer jealous dishonesty of George Bush is hard to overstate. With his zealous 'opposition research', he certainly knows that the 'invented the internet' quote he constantly uses to ridicule Al Gore is wrong and that the real quote is an honest claim about his visionary role in the internet's development.
From a Salon.com article by Scott Rosenberg on 10/5/00:
"But things that 'everybody knows' are always worth examining for defects. And the 'Gore claims he invented the Net' trope is so full of holes that it makes you wish there were product recalls for bad information.
"Gore never claimed to have 'invented' the Internet. What he said was:
"'During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet. '
"As my colleague Jake Tapper carefully reported here last year, at worst that statement is a minor exaggeration of Gore's legislative record -- and miles away from the "I built it from scratch!" lie into which it has been twisted."
And later in the article, Rosenberg observes:
"Well, technologists do have a right to their political leanings, don't they? But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.
"That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor 'a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement.'
"'In the early days of the Web,' says Hallam-Baker, who was there, 'he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep.' "