Presidential candidate Barack Obama released a new ad entitled 1982 that, in part, mocks John McCain for not using a computer or knowing how to use e-mail.
He admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer. Can’t send an e-mail.
Jonah Goldberg of National Review finds a report from the March 4, 2000 Boston Globe explaining why John McCain isn’t spending a lot of time in front of the computer.
McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan – Ted Williams is his hero – but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.
A disgusting side of Barack Obama is being revealed in his panicked desperation since losing his status as front runner in this Presidential campaign.
UPDATE: Forbes (also from the year 2000 and via Stop the ACLU) explains further. Seems McCain isn’t the technological rube Obama would have you believe. Imagine that: A lie from the Obama camp.
In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain admits.
By the way, speaking of 1982, what was Obama doing in 1982?
UPDATE 2: A bunch of lefty blogs are claiming that McCain’s occasional use of a Blackberry he doesn’t own negates Obama’s gaffe. Sorry, doesn’t fly. McCain uses someone else’s Blackberry most communication being “oral and done with [his] cell phone” as clearly noted in his July 2008 interview with the New York Times.
Q: Do you use a blackberry or email?
Mr. McCain: No
Mark Salter: He uses a BlackBerry, just ours.
Mr. McCain: I use the Blackberry, but I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail. I read e-mails all the time, but the communications that I have with my friends and staff are oral and done with my cell phone.
The quote from the Forbes article in the first update (above) goes into more detail regarding the “laborious” process McCain endures to engage in email.
And, as usual, the lefty blogs and “Obama Can Do No Wrong” crowd miss the point entirely. Whether McCain can or cannot physically use a computer, sufficient evidence from credible sources exists that at the very least shows typing on a keyboard to be intensely painful for him.
In this light, you would have to be a complete idiot to launch this kind of attack against him. Following closely on the heels of an entire week of idiotic gaffes, this is one more brush stroke painting the picture of Obama and his campaign (the direction of which he cites as “executive experience”) as intenesly incompetent blunderers.
