The Second-Worst Part of Obama's "You Didn't Build That" Speech...

This excerpt brought to my attention via Commentary:

If you own a business — that, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Iternet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.


Really?  History begs to differ from Obama's comic-book alt-reality:

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the "Internet."


DARPA is certainly government funded, but to claim the government created the internet is like claiming the federal government won the Second World War.  Obama's proposed budget, by the way, would have made cuts to DARPA and related projects being developed under its auspices.  .No more men on the moon, no more Internets. I suppose.

Oh - and the "why":

The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.


Should there be a military, nuclear, or natural disaster, communications between/within the military, sciences, and the government could be kept open with this newfangled "internet".

Commerce was never in the minds of non-governmental scientist who created the thing. Thus, the president's statement that "Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet" is 100% false.

Ignorant much, Mr. Obama? Were this a Bush speech, it would be hailed as evidence of his stupidity. Instead, the media is helping push the "taken out of context" meme, and whitewashing the president's shocking historical inaccuracies.

Others, however, are not so kind:

The truth is that Mr. Obama has never been a deep thinker. We shouldn't be surprised because "liberalism" itself is just an incoherent grab bag of half-baked ideas....

[Obama] was president of the Harvard Law Review without ever having published an article....Writing brings clarity to our thoughts. We have nothing in this regard from our president because he has never thought about anything in depth or questioned the basis for his ideas. His is a juvenile mind full of semi-coherent nonsense.

Mr. Romney needs to force the president off message. If Mr. Obama starts thinking out loud again, the gaffes will follow. He's no philosopher king. It's time he was exposed for the muddled thinker he is.


That's assuming, of course, that there are people who want to expose him, as opposed to covering up for him...


Epilogue:  Apparently, Barack Obama is following in a fine liberal tradition of stupidity regarding the internet.  And it predates even Al Gore:


When the late Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968 that the pioneering Massachusetts company BBN had won the ARPA contract for an "interface message processor (IMP)," he sent a congratulatory telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the "interfaith message processor" contract.