Serial Fibber II
Al Gore must be laughing to himself today.
Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.
"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."
When this campaign is done, the question won't be if McCain's campaign went off the rails, but how far off the rails it went.
Update: The NY Times got McCain's reaction and a brief statement from a minion:
A senior aide to Mr. McCain, Matt McDonald later said that Mr. McCain “laughed” when he heard the comment, according to a pool report. “He would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry,’’ he said. “This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer.”
A staffer??
Let's look at the bio of this lowly 'staffer'.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin was a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from 2007 to March 2008. He was the director of the Congressional Budget Office (2003–05). He also served for 18 months as chief economist in the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush (2001–02) and for two years as senior staff economist in President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (1989–90).
Dr. Holtz-Eakin is also the president of DHE Consulting, LLC and serves as policy director for John McCain’s 2008 bid for president of the United States. He has held academic appointments at Columbia and Princeton Universities and was chairman and trustee professor of economics and associate director of the Maxwell Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University.
He was director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has advised several state governments and was principal investigator for several federal government–agency research initiatives.
This guy is a senior policy advisor for McCain. That they're trying to paint him as a lowly staff member is laughable.
And the line of bullshit he tried to push today is a bit more serious than stealing cookie recipes from the Food Network.