John McCain showed himself to be pretty damned stupid when he claimed that the streets of Baghdad were safe to stroll through and then, to prove his point, went there with a hundred troops, five helicopters, and a flak jacket. Now that he’s gotten that out of the way, he attended a conference on technology and quickly made an ass of himself there as well.

First of all, he came out against Network Neutrality. You know, the protocol that was probably one of the most responsible for making the Internet successful. The one that has kept the Telecoms from turning the Internet into their private piggy bank, making everyone pay for everything and throwing their weight around worse than Microsoft does.

McCain, a self-described “free trader” and “deregulator” apparently does not understand what the hell “Network Neutrality” is. To be against Network Neutrality is virtually the opposite of free trade on the Internet, allowing a few companies to have constrictive proprietary control over the system. And it’s not “deregulating,” because there’s no tome of regulation or any bureaucracy involved–just a simple rule, that everyone is truly equal and free on the Internet. McCain’s statements were virtually spot-on to the scripts written by the Telecom lobbyists.

But then McCain made an even bigger fool of himself, by saying that he would put Steve Ballmer on his cabinet to advise him on technology issues (apparently unaware that such a cabinet position does not exist), and said he’d consider Ballmer for an ambassadorial position, maybe in China. The latter has been noted as a “joke,” but probably because no one in his or her right mind could believe that a person could be so monumentally stupid as to seriously suggest such a thing. But then, was McCain’s statement about having Ballmer as a technology advisor also a joke? Nobody thinks so, though pretty much everyone sees the idea as ludicrous. Who knows, maybe McCain seriously promoted the idea of Ballmer on his cabinet, then either because of laughter from the audience or an internal realization of how stupid the idea was, then tried to turn it into a joke by mentioning the China spot.

Either way, McCain is poison to technology. The man is dropping like a dead weight–sorry to see after he seemed so enticing in 2000. Either it was a sham then too, or McCain realized that the only way to be taken seriously was to sell out, big time.