JOHN 16:3 John McCaslin, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Internet is proving, once again, to have a shelf life of its own. The question now is whether subscribers are pulling the more classic selections off the fiction shelf.

It was just four months ago that Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah appeared before a Christian Coalition gathering in Washington and poked fun at Vice President Al Gore for giving a speech on the importance of faith.

"As proof, he related that his favorite Bible verse is John 16:3," Mr. Hatch observed, noting that the vice president surely meant to say John 3:16, which promises everlasting life to those who believe in God.

Then, for the benefit of his audience - not to mention his own political aspirations - Mr. Hatch quoted John 16:3: "And these things will they do unto you because they have not known the Father or me."

"No one in the vice president's office was familiar enough with the Scriptures to catch the error," Mr. Hatch continued. "The irony is, if Dan Quayle had said this, the media would have been all over him. But, of course, would any reporter have the Bible to check it out?"

Mr. Hatch, who could not be reached yesterday, didn't cite a source for his information, nor did he mention in what speech Mr. Gore uttered the apparent blooper. Perhaps he didn't know.

Unlike the mainstream media, much of the material disseminated over the Internet, particularly of political scope, is neither sourced, nor checked for accuracy.  "With specific regards to the Internet, people are intelligent and smart enough to evaluate things on their own," Mr. Lehane believes. Still, this isn't the first time Mr. Gore has been burned by the Internet - an "educational" tool he's strived hard to hook up to every school in the nation.

"Another example took place last summer," Mr. Lehane says. "These [Internet] people ran a list of so-called `Goreisms,' ridiculous comments attributed to Mr. Gore. When in fact every one of them, it turns out, were Dan Quayle's comments."

If you are curious, the person who made this biblical gaffe wasn't Al Gore, but George Bush, Sr., at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in 1991, as reported by conservative Christian Cal Thomas, in "Blinded by Might":

"Bush said it in my presence at a religious broadcasters convention, and I wrote about it in my book, Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?  But somehow it got twisted around and stuck on the Internet and put in Al Gore's mouth. He's got a lot of stuff that he has to defend, but that's not one of them."