« Arugula for All | Main | Central » It's a Google! (On a series of Tubes)10 Jun 2008 11:01 am Via Brendan Nyhan, John McCain may not have invented the internet, but he sure does know how to use the lingo: "You know, basically it's a Google," he said to laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked how the selection process was going. "What you can find out now on the Internet -- it's remarkable." That's not change you can believe in! [horrifying grimace] Comments (25)
Meaning the each candidate gets 'a Google'. Hardly Ted Stevens territory, and no more grammatically mangled than a large percentage of your cogently argued posts. 
At least he referred to the internet in the singular.
Matt: Thanks for weighing in on this important topic. Let me elaborate: I hear you can find a google in the internet tubes. However, I am not sure if you need one of those techie plumbers to find the google, but my people say the google is very interesting and worth pursuing.
Jeez. At least when George Bush called it "The Google" he showed some indication that he knew that it was something used to search the internet.
Oh, great, first it's verb tenses, and now it's indefinite articles. When will McCain learn to speak the English?
Maybe he meant "It's a googol." Would that make any more sense?
My old man has just turned 60, he is about as sharp and fit as any his age. While visiting me from France recently he commented on McCain's age and said that there was NO WAY someone his own age, let alone McCain's should be, POTUS. Perhaps this wouldn't be such a prominent issue if McCain's speaking style was clear and concise, but it's not. And these out of touch gaffs compound concerns about his age. Yes, the Internet is remarkable... grandpa!
The GOP: Making Abraham Simpson look young since 1960.
Oh boy... Next he'll be cluing people into icanhazcheezburger.com.
What's wrong with posts like this I think is they chauvinistically neglect the more fanboyish aspects of techie culture. Like, for example-- What did John McCain think of Tekwars? No one seems to be asking these questions.
McCain told Army Wives his wife makes him watch with her, so it's quite possible his kids made him read Tekwars. (Confession: I didn't know if Tekwars was something one watched or played, and so googled it, then realized I was being all meta.) Anyhow, someone tell McCain not to believe everything he reads about Jindal, Crist, etc on the tubes. And is there any chance we could get the guy who called the internet a bunch of tubes to endorse McCain? It would launch a million YouTube hits.
Ah, yes, I remember my first Google as if it was yesterday. What a Google it was, coming through the series of tubes all aut-o-matic-ally. It was the summer of aught-three and I lived in the great metropolis of New-York, which we had but recently wrested from the hated Dutchmen. I was wearing an onion on my belt, which was, of course, the fashion at the time...
That's not change you can believe in! [horrifying grimace] No, it's McC., not Obama, so it's "a leader you can believe in", rather than "change you can beliene in." Personally, I find McCain's exisitance all too plausible.
"McCain: He's a Google you can believe in"
"it's a Google" makes complete grammatical sense to me. This is no different than saying "basically it's an email" versus "basically I send an email". /compsci major
That's actually a misprint. He said "It's a Gogol", letting it slip that his Veep choice will be a descendant of Nikolai Gogol, the Russian writer.
As much as I enjoy making fun of how out of touch McCain is, my guess is that slightly more context would reveal that this makes more sense than it appears to at first glance. The question was probably something like "how are you doing with your vetting of possible running mates?" and in his answer McCain simply left out the word "search", i.e. "basically it's a Google search. . .what you can find out now on the internet, it's remarkable." He's just saying that with the use of Google the vetting process is pretty easy, you just google each person and see what you find. I'm trying to gin up some indignation at the fact that he's basically boasting about how superficial his vetting process is, but given that this was clearly just a joke intended to brush aside more questions, I'm not really feeling it. But John McCain is still your new jalopy!
let's go even further to say that every time mccain "misspeaks", it's really just something that requires a less stringent grammatical examination plus a look at the larger context of what he said. because 8 years of that crap wasn't enough. /please stop
Deborah at 12:26: that comment about Tekwars was actually just an idle attempt at humor. I don't really care whether or not McCain has any opinion on sci-fi/geek entertainment.
Re: grammatical correctness of it I think McCain could have been using a coined term he heard from something- comparing it to "a Google," short for "a Google search," to say that there are a zillion interesting candidates that the campaign is looking at. I don't think it really matters though how on-the-ball criticism of McCain for saying "It's a Google" is, though. I'm sure Matt probably didn't mean it as a particularly serious or significant criticism. Anyway, that's a difference between the Republicans and us-- they go nuts over little things, and make them into a big part of their rhetoric. We, on the other hand, treat stuff like this as little jokes and half-serious criticisms, and realize that what we are really politically contending over are the serious issues that really effect people's lives, rather than every little gaffe that occurs or that one can characterize something or other as having been.
yes, more "I think McCain could have been saying..." type of stuff please. i don't get enough of that from the media.
Anybody remember that ad with the guy with a country-western drawl voice going, "You just click-click-click-click-click it's real easy, man!"
Comments closed June 24, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
You forgot the death rattle/chuckle.
Posted by mad6798j | June 10, 2008 11:07 AM