DC Trawler

The White House only needed a week to figure out what NASA does

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Which is pretty good, considering how long it’s taken them to figure out what an oil spill does.

Here’s Robert Gibbs, backpedalling like a mofo on NASA chief Charles Bolden’s claim that one of the agency’s foremost priorities is to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering”:

FoxNews.com:

Bolden, though, said last month in the interview that it was President Obama who gave him that task. He made a similar claim in February.

The White House also backed up Bolden last week when his remarks first stirred controversy. A White House spokesman last Tuesday said Obama wants NASA to engage with the world’s best scientists and that to meet that challenge, NASA must “partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries.”

NASA last week walked back Bolden’s claim that Muslim outreach was the “perhaps foremost” plank of his mission, saying that Bolden was merely talking about his “outreach” responsibilities and that space exploration is still NASA’s No. 1 job.

Now, Bolden claimed that this edict came directly from Obama himself. If that’s not true, why did Bolden say it? Does the head of NASA really get to tell such a huge lie about the President of the United States and keep his job?

And if it is true, why is the White House now claiming it isn’t? And couldn’t they come up with something better? You wouldn’t think it’d take a week to come up with, in summary: “Nuh-uh!”

Jim Treacher