[serf]

>Al Gore never claimed that, btw,

GORE: “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.”

There are three ways to read the first sentence, two of which take the presumption that Al Gore invented the internet.

Snopes is so half-wrong that it's getting to be easy to ignore.

In other words , he did say that, he just didn't mean for people to interpret his ambiguous statement in that fashion.

aside : the word of the day is initiative.

[zuminator]

Gore absolutely deserves to be dinged for speaking ambiguously in a way that leans towards greatly inflating his contribution to the field.

But at the same time, anyone who's ever read or written a résumé will readily recognize "took the initiative in creating" as CV-speak for "I assisted in some capacity, however minor." I expect the actual number of people misled by Gore's self-puffery to have been small to nonexistent.