McCain Campaign: Umm… He Created the BlackBerry?

I only bring this up because of my previous post about McCain’s “computer illiteracy.”

You just can’t make this kind of stuff up. From Politico:

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.”

Apparently, Senator McCain also thinks this is absurd:

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.”

The original BlackBerrys were made by a Canadian company, Research in Motion.

Problem is: Holtz-Eakin wasn’t joking, though he is obviously bone-headed.