The debate over the origin of the Internet rages on.
For weeks, the right has been having a field day ripping President Obama over his "you didn't build that" line—often contorting and obfuscating the context. The Wall Street Journal's Gordon Crovitz is being heavily criticized by tech experts and his own sources for a piece he wrote this week repeating the right's characterization of Obama's line and arguing the government had no hand in the creation of the Internet.
Those on the right including Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove are repeating Crovitz's claims.
Rove, who served as George W. Bush's senior advsior, told Fox & Friends Thursday that the piece was "brilliant" and that Obama's comments have "hit a raw nerve among small-business people." And Limbaugh went so far as to call to call Obama's claim that "the Internet didn't get invented on its own" "diabolical."
The firestorm erupted after President Obama gave a speech earlier in the month arguing that business owners owe some credit to government investment. When it comes to roads, schools, public infrastructure and the internet, Obama told business owners, "you didn't build that." Republicans have chiseled that quote out of its original context to suggest that the president was saying that the "it" was businesses—not public works projects—and that business owners can't claim credit for building their own businesses.
Indeed, Mitt Romney has gone so far to hold "We did build it" events this week, teaming up with several businesses in battleground states. At the events, business owners have insisted that government is stalling their growth.
But on Thursday, MSNBC host Al Sharpton branded these events as hypocritical, pointing to a Think Progress report detailing how several of the participating businesses were actually built with government subsidies and contracts.
"I don't need the Internet to know this—it's called hypocrisy," said Sharpton.
"All you need to know is government funding allowed researchers to work on what eventually became the Internet," said Sharpton. Simply put, he continued, the right is playing "pure politics."
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Next thing that you know, the Right will tell us that the government does nothing. I mean, they have to contract out to build roads and get recruits (not government made) to post a military. Surely, if we just paved the District of Columbia, all will be perfect, in our perfect Union.
My question is, why does the Right make so many rather stupid comments which, at best, grossly stretch the truth? How about just sticking within the realm of reasoned reality!
Go pick up a history book and start reading it from end to end. The United States government, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Army all worked together in a partnership with corporations they nurtured and subsidized to create modern America. The U.S. Army Corps or Engineers dredged the rivers that were used by the steam river boats. The Eric Canal was built by government contracts and subsidies. The transcontinental railroad was built in partnership with the Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Army, who surveyed the land, built forts to tame the Native Americans, and provided engineering trained officers who became executives in the railroad companies. Military contracts kept these railroad companies alive in hard times too. WW I, WW II, the Cold War were all fought and won by a combined military-government-industrial partnership. Our automobile industry was created by the need for trucks by the Army after WW I. The Navy gave us the first hybrid electric vehicle in the form of the oil turbine electric powered battleship. The U.S Army and the U.S. Navy created the aviation industry in the 1920's. President Eisenhower built the Interstate highway system as a result of his military experience of driving trucks across the U.S. after WW I and as commander in Europe in WW II. German autobahn became the American interstate system.
The U.S. Army started the space program by shooting Germany V-2 rockets at FT Bliss, Texas and with engineers at Huntsville, Alabama. The Space race and ballistic missile arms race with the Soviet Union had huge spin offs for private industry with satellites, microwave technology, solid state electronics, radar, and a whole range of aviation advances. All business entrepreneurs walk behind the path that soldiers, sailors, and government funded scientists and engineers have created for them first. The internet was created by the Department of Defense not by Bill Gates who merely exploited the opportunity created for him by the government. Facts are inconvenient things for conservative spin machine idiots.