2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards

Drum roll please...

"One of the things I've learned on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see -- I've forgotten the name of the program -- but you get the satellite, and you can -- like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It reminds me of where I wanna be sometimes."-- Bush, asked during an interview with CNBC if he ever googled anybody.

"The Google." How quaint -- if it were coming from your grandmother. (And that would be Google Earth, Mr. President.)
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Here's a real beaut, also from a prominent political figure. For breathtaking cluelessness it actually surpasses Bush by a wide margin. But coming as it does from a mere U.S. senator, it must necessarily be subordinate. Rank has its privileges.

"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."-- Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) deconstructs the frustrations of (we think) file sharing, during a speech opposing net neutrality before the Senate Commerce Committee.

OK, the guy is 85 years old. Ordinarily, you'd cut him some slack. But Stevens chaired that committee -- which oversees regulation of the internet.
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In the interest of being fair and balanced, like Fox News, it should be noted that famous liberals can have trouble getting it, too. Here's CNN's Larry King, admitting that he's never used the internet before:

"What do you do? Punch little buttons and things?"
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And how about this one, from Eric Schmidt, CEO of internet Wirtschaftswunder Google:

"We actually did an evil scale and decided (that) not to serve at all was worse evil."

Google's motto is "Don't be evil." When the company started doing business in China, it had to amend that motto slightly. Google took heavy flak for bending to the oppressive regulations severely limiting free speech on the internet there. Schmidt defended staying in the market (an important word to remember here), saying that even though "we weren't wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all." This is what Schmidt's "evil scale" concluded, apparently. Presumably, his accountants concluded the same thing, but for very different reasons. A number of parody sites drew their own conclusions.
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This next quote, by Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, doesn't necessarily qualify as lame. It's certainly cynical, but to some folks it probably just sounds honest:

"Let's face it. We're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap -- and watch porn."-- As quoted by Fortune magazine during a corporate dinner in San Francisco recently.


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