By Pam Spaulding
Cross-posted at Pam’s House Blend

UPDATE: It’s hard to keep up with the lies. Additions are below the fold. Jeebus H. Christ, from the man who needs his wife to surf the Internets, this breathtaking boast from a spokesbot:

Move over, Al Gore. You may lay claim to the Internet, but John McCain helped create the BlackBerry. At least that’s the contention of a top McCain policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

Waving his BlackBerry personal digital assistant and citing McCain’s work as a senator, he told reporters Tuesday, “You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.” McCain has acknowledged that he doesn’t know how to use a computer and can’t send e-mail, one of the BlackBerry’s prime functions.

Paging Al Gore…Ari Melber at the Washington Independent:

Within the hour, [Obama] chief spokesperson Bill Burton released a statement putting the falsehood in context: “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.” Now let’s briefly correct this latest McCain campaign whopper.

McCain did not “help create” the “miracle” of the BlackBerry — he does not even know how to use email or a computer. The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee was not even pivotal: the BlackBerry was invented by a Canadian company, Research In Motion. So this claim is false and absurd, obviously, and it may seem like a distraction from the current debate over the candidates’ economic agendas.

And the damage control begins:

According to a McCain campaign pool report, senior aide Matt McDonald said that McCain “laughed” when he was told about Holtz-Eakin’s comment. “He would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer,” McDonald said.

There’s already a Facebook group up, Thank You John McCain for inventing the BlackBerry!

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