Sadly, Conservatives believe what they want to believe and do not rely upon any connection to facts, truth or reality to impinge on that process. For anyone else these are the facts.

"It was a gaffe worthy of Dan Quayle, but with Clinton-style grandiosity. In a March 10 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Al Gore bragged about his record. "During my service in the United States Congress," he said, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

"In this important sense, "the Internet" dates not to 1969 but to the early 1980s. Gore enters the picture a bit later--in 1987, when he supported a drive by universities to expand funding for NSFNet. That drive became law in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which gave about $1 billion to high-performance networks and computers; about $150 million of the funding was new money, with the rest consolidated from other programs.

"Gore gets credit for cheerleading on networking from '87 on, and for getting the agencies to get off their behinds and coordinate things a bit," says Mike Roberts, who lobbied for NSFNet funding as vice president of networking at Educom, an association of universities. "But [he's] not exactly the father of the Internet."

Something like the internet needs friends in high places to get going. They can be quite influential in cutting through bureaucratic tangles AND make it easier to get funding. Gore saw early on that the internet was a good thing, and was instrumental in "creating the internet". Not by himself, he wasn't even the major driving force.

But he did more than anyone around here. And he never claimed to have invented it. Anyone who says so is lying.

Arf