Denial is not a river in Egypt
The NASA/Al Jazera interview, where NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said that one of his primary missions was to conduct an outreach to Muslim scientists and to essentially build the Muslim world’s self-esteem has now gotten an official and not unexpected response from the White House:
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that such activities are not among Bolden’s assigned tasks. He said administration officials have spoken with NASA about the matter.
Read that carefully – it says nothing about those tasks having been among Bolden’s assigned tasks. It says the administration has "spoken with NASA" and that at the moment of Gibbs announcement – a number of days later – that the task Bolden outlined is "not among" them any more.
With this crew, you definitely have to weigh each and every word officially uttered and be able to read between the lines. No where in that statement is there a denial that it was a task at one time, and it is hard to believe that the administrator of NASA would get his priority tasks from the administration so badly screwed up, isn’t it?
Just sayin’ …
~McQ
NASA’s new frontier – Muslim self-esteem?
Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the "foremost" task President Obama has given him is "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." Thus, NASA’s primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of "predominantly Muslim nations."
Seriously. Watch the video at Powerline. An 18.5 billion budget spent on self-esteem outreach? Because, per the Obama administration, NASA no longer has a space exploration mission. In fact, as Powerline points out, space exploration didn’t even make the top three priority missions Bolden is charged with:
The other two are "re-inspire children to want to get into science and math" and "expand our international relationships.
So essentially NASA’s new mission is a) muslim outreach and self-esteem bolstering, b) exciting kids about science and math and c) expand international relationships, obviously not for space exploration though. Now that’s leadership.
And you wonder why we’re going broke, heading toward mediocrity and have clueless leadership engaged in misusing an expensive agency for self-esteem projects on your dime?
See the results of the election held in November of 2008.
~McQ