John Sidney McCain III Invented the BlackBerry

No, this is not a report from Declan "Draw By Crayon Libertarian" McCullagh, this is an actual claim from the McCain campaign:

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."

It would be less laughable if he had not become chair of the commerce committee until 1997, by which point, RIM had been in existence for seven years.