…before you label the person telling it a liar? This is a question I have for Joe Scarborough and the of the TV journalists who insist on televising people like Terry Holt.
Whilst over at C&L, I came across this little nugget and I just couldn’t let it pass.

Last night on Scarborough Country, Republican strategist Terry Holt advanced for the umpteenth time the right’s favorite Al Gore smear — that he claimed to have invented the internet.

This picture remains one of my favorite internet pics of all time:

Why? Because Al Gore is one of the major reasons I’m able to write and the reason you’re able to read this post. That’s not reaching or embellishing his efforts at all. The bill called the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 was called “The Gore Bill”. That was not due to its high content of Clive Barker references; it was because Al Gore drafted it.

Terry Holt is a either a typical Republican idiot or he is deliberately attempting to denigrate the authority and prestige of someone whose accomplishments he is obscenely jealous of. Take your pick, Terry. It’s one or the other when someone in this day and age can step in front of a national audience and make a statement so untrue that it kills small children with its mere utterance.

This also goes for the lot of you who insist on hanging on to this lie. You are so irrecoverably misguided that you really need to go live in the mountains somewhere — a place that you can’t hurt anyone but yourself.

From the people who actually fathered the internet:

Leonard Kleinrock – considered the father of packet-switching theory:

A second development occurred around this time, namely, then-Senator Al Gore, a strong and knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that resulted in President George Bush signing the High Performance Computing and Communication act of 1991. This Act allocated $600 million for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network [13-14]. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit/sec networking.

Vinton G. Cerf and Dave Farber – “Founding Fathers” of the internet:

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
…Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.

So here’s a call to end all of this bullshit. If another person goes on Hannity’s show or Scarborough Country and let’s this lie fly and the host lets it go, I swear to God and Sunny Jesus that I will have Al Gore call you personally and tell you to get off his fucking internet.

Oh, and Terry Holt is not to be believed about anything until he publicly apologizes for being that fucking ignorant, whether it was intentional or not.