Forget Snopes. The Daily Howler is your friend. Not only the quote and when it was made, but detailed histories of exactly what parts of the press decided it was worth propogating this sorry tale, why and how. Most of it written in real time as it unfolded. One of the essential sites if you want to understand your modern media.
Only one of them. 
Diceman:
How about if Bill Gates takes credit for inventing Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office? (He didn’t write the C++ lines. He made the administrative & project-funding decisions. More of a “Sally” thing than a “Fred” thing.)
Snopes srewed it big time here. They start with:
Then, Al Gore’s quote follows:
And then, the exegesis from Snopes:
I do not agree with that interpretation. Al Gore doesn’t say that he took initiatives that helped the creation of the Internet. On the contrary, he clearly states that he took many initiatives, and one of them was the creation of the Internet.
It’s not as if the Republicans are the only ones guilty of this sort of thing; Democrats and other parties do exactly the same thing. (Even – gasp! – politicians and flunkies in other countries.)
There are some quotes I have seen attributed to everyone from Dan Quayle to Al Franken to George W. Bush to Al Sharpton to Ralph Nader.
This is just one of the reasons I loathe politics.
RR
Bill Gates is head of the company that created Windows, and is the ultimate boss of the people who did write the code for Windows, so he gets some credit in this way. But more importantly, he created the DOS operating system, which is the foundation upon which Windows is based.
Al Gore and the Internet is more analogous to a person who owns stock in Microsoft (but has never worked there) claiming to have created Windows.
Well, no, because the average stockholder in a company has very little input into decisions of how the company allocates funds, what projects go to R&D, etc. As a member of Congress, Gore was in a position to sponsor initiatives to create that which became the internet that a stockholder in a company would be unable to do.
Regardless, the claim put forward is that Gore claimed he “invented” the internet. Invented. That claim is clearly a lie.
If I recall correctly, MS bought DOS off another company. And Windows 2000 and Windows XP have little in common with DOS.
True, which is why I can’t argue that Gore sponsored the 'net, or even developed it. But “created” implies a direct role, not a supporting one.
As for that Snopes article, this is a case where Snopes’ logic is flawed. Look at this two quotes:
Obviously, one can resonably interpret Gore’s comment as a claim of invention, since Snopes goes to great lengths to differentiate between different meaning of “create.” Also note that Snopes tacitly admits that Gore was engaging in a bit of self-aggrandizement.
We’re arguing the difference between ‘invent’ and ‘create’?
in·vent
- To produce or contrive (something previously unknown) by the use of ingenuity or imagination.
cre·ate
- To cause to exist; bring into being.
- To give rise to; produce.
Again, I’ll give you poorly worded. Not, ‘create’ and ‘invent’ are different concepts.
No, we’re arguing the difference between “Al Gore claimed he invented the internet,” which is a deliberate lie, and “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.” which as near as I can tell is not.
The way I understand it, the fisrt part (During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.) is not connected to the rest of his quote. It’s like saying “I took many important initiatives and one of them was the creation of the Internet.”
The phrase was “in creating” and we all agree that he made a slight mistake in his choice of words during that one interview (what else has he said about his role “in creating” the internet?). If he had said “in helping to create the internet” or “in the creation of the internet” he’d be president and there’d be no war in Iraq. The ignorance of the American public and the way partisan spin exploits that is having a huge impact on history.
As you drive north from Utica, NY, you will come to a crossroads named Alder Creek, where State Route 28 diverges from State Route 12, heading up into the Adirondacks to Old Forge and Long Lake. A few miles up this road, it shaves the edge of a hamlet named Forestport, in the town(ship) of the same name.
Forestport has not a whole lot to say for it – it’s a little “blue highways” town like many others across the U.S. Many of its citizens are quite low income, though a few are not.
The hamlet has a public water system, owned and operated by the Town (i.e., township), and supplied from some springs a couple of miles away along Irish Settlement Road.
Back in the early 1990s the old public water system was severely deteriorated and subject to influxes. The transmission water main carrying the hamlet’s water alongside Irish Settlement Road from the spring to the hamlet was deteriorated, leaking out more than it carried the full length, and quite possible subject to pollution.
The folks who ran the town government, part time, were nice enough people, with no more expertise than the average Doper in negotiating through the maze of red tape and state bureaucracy.
The state wanted the town to convert to a drilled-well groundwater system, rather than using the springs, because of a philosophy that groundwater was generally purer and more healthful than spring water, which could easily be polluted by runoff from neighboring fields and such.
Neither the people of the hamlet nor the town government had the money to repair the transmission or distribution water mains, to drill the wells, or any of the other expenses needed to upgrade the system to something safe.
A professional colleague of mine looked at the problem, and wrote a grant application to HUD in their behalf to repair or replace the most severe problems with their water system. They were awarded the grant, and began complying with the state requirements by drilling test wells around the area at likely sites where they might find groundwater to supply the town.
Those wells kept coming up dry, and the expense of doing the tests was eating up the grant funds at an alarming rate. Doing water main repairs was beginning to look less and less likely.
At this point I was moonlighting from my state job at the consulting business my colleague had begun, to help communities get funds for this sort of thing (and make a little money in the process).
We assessed the situation in Forestport, along with a number of other communities we had contracts with, and decided to try to write a second grant proposal for them.
My colleague, whose business it was, began to do work on the other communities, and told me to rough draft what I’d do with Forestport. I came up with the idea of structuring it as a Phase II proposal – where they’d used half the previous grant funds to attempt to comply with state regulations, and would use the remainder, along with a second grant in the same amount, to upgrade and protect the surface water source, replace the transmission main, and repair or replace the worst of the distribution main problems – and hook up a few low-income people to the new system. Our consulting engineers, working on spec, wrote up the plans along these lines, and we presented it as if they had planned all along to do the work in two phases (actually it had been their intent to do everything with the first grant, but the cost of the defunct test wells had made that impossible).
HUD bought the idea, and awarded them the funds to do the work. Over the next two years, Forestport got a new water system, the State Health people certified their springwater source as acceptable, and all worked out for the best.
It’s a nice little community. I’m glad I had a chance to help them.
Now, a question: Did I “get Forestport a new water system”? Would it be fair, given all the above, for me to stroke my own ego by making that claim?
I was an employee of a consulting firm. It was the contractors who built the system, the engineers who designed it, the town who applied for the grant, and HUD who gave the money to build it. And the grant application itself was officially the product of my colleague/boss D/B/A the consulting firm, not of me personally, though virtually all its content was my doing.
I’m proud to claim that I did. There were a lot of other people involved. But it was I who had the idea of how to present it in a way that would get them the money to do it, and did the work that justified that idea to HUD.
I got Forestport their new water system. And Al Gore “invented the Internet.”