Now that the McCain campaign has decided on its "all easily disproved lies, all the time" strategy (with, so far, great returns!), they are finding it hard to even come up with relevant or convincing things to lie about. Which is why McCain policy advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin today held aloft his BlackBerry and announced to confused reporters, "you're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create." Wait, what? The AP is already comparing this to Al Gore's "I invented the internet" claim, which as everyone but Maureen Dowd hopefully now knows, was actually mostly true, in that Gore actually said he "took the initiative to create the Internet," in the context of his being the only Senator in the 1980s who kept babbling about the importance of national computer networking initiatives. So by that measure, how true is this? What is the supporting evidence? Ha ha it still seems like crazy bullshit.

Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said McCain's service on and leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee put him at the intersection of a number of economic interests, including the telecommunications industry. The Arizona senator's handling of regulation and deregulation of that industry in particular left him with the skills to help revive the economy amid a mortgage crisis, an energy crisis and a Wall Street meltdown, the adviser said.

In other words, by being a stalwart slave to the telecommunications lobby, McCain allowed them to write their own regulatory policy and therefore create the BlackBerry, a shitty piece of limited and overpriced techonology lightyears behind what's available in Western Europe and Asia. GOOD WORK.