Did John McCain Invent the BlackBerry?

Is John McCain's campaign channeling the big, fat, internet-inventing ghost of Al Gore's 2000 campaign?

It might appear as though…

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."

Alright, alright, alright. That's a kind of silly thing to say, and I'm sure that a lot of people will have fun with that quote, but I think they'll be misrepresenting Holtz-Eakin's intent of meaning.

He clearly wasn't saying that McCain was helping to invent the BlackBerry way back when.

He was saying that McCain was helping to invent the blackberry way back when.

And agriculture was key to the formation of modern civilization, so that's pretty commendable.

Update: As Ana Marie Cox points out, the people who make BlackBerrys(ies?) are Canadian.