You can't make up stuff like this — unless maybe you're Scrappleface or Iowahawk. And even then, some people would consider it pretty outlandish and over the top even for satire. I believe Power Line's Paul Mirengoff first broke this story on Sunday, when few of us were reading blogs (emphasis added):
In the video below, 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."
Exploring space didn't even make the top three things Obama wants Bolden to accomplish. The other two are "re-inspire children to want to get into science and math" and "expand our international relationships,"
Yesterday, Byron York added more details (emphasis added):
In the same interview, Bolden also said the United States, which first sent men to the moon in 1969, is no longer capable of reaching beyond low earth orbit without help from other nations.
Bolden made the statements during a recent trip to the Middle East. …
Bolden’s trip included a June 15 speech at the American University in Cairo. In that speech, he said in the past NASA worked mostly with countries that are capable of space exploration. But that, too, has changed in light of Obama’s Cairo initiative. “He asked NASA to change…by reaching out to ‘non-traditional’ partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and in particular in Muslim-majority nations,” Bolden said. “NASA has embraced this charge.”
“NASA is not only a space exploration agency,” Bolden concluded, “but also an earth improvement agency.”
Well, that dovetails with their emphasis in recent years of promoting bogus anthropogenic global warming information. OK, let's make it official. Since their top objectives no longer include anything to do with aeronautics and space, it's time to take "Aeronautics and Space" out of the name. Rename it the National Earth Improvement Agency.
Today, Daniel Pipes offered four spot-on observations about this nonsense (emphasis added):
First, it is inordinately patronizing for Americans to make Muslims “feel good” about their medieval contributions to science. This will lead to more resentment than gratitude.
Second, Muslims at present do lag in the sciences and the way to fix this is not condescension from NASA but some deep Muslim introspection. Put differently, accomplished scientists of Muslim origin — including NASA’s Farouk El-Baz, who is of Egyptian origins — do exist. The problem lies in societies, and include everything from insufficient resources to poor education to the ravages of Islamism.
Third, polls indicate that Obama’s effort to win Muslim public opinion has been a failure, with his popularity in majority-Muslim countries hardly better than George W. Bush’s. Why continue with these farcical and failed attempts to win good will?
Finally, it’s a perversion of American scientific investment to distort a space agency into a feel-good tool of soft diplomacy. Just as soldiers are meant to fight, not carry out social programs, so scientists must work to expand the frontiers of knowledge, not to make select people “feel good.”
Notice that the new mission of NASA — I mean NEIA — isn't to help the people in Muslim nations better themselves and achieve more competence in science, math, and engineering. It's just to make them feel good, while leaving their actual circumstances unchanged.
I'll give the President this: he's consistent. Domestically, the Obama agenda is not to increase opportunity and encourage people on society's lower rungs to climb up, but to confiscate wealth and drag those at the top of the ladder down. Likewise, internationally, the agenda is not to encourage third-world nations to emulate our success and lift themselves up, but to destroy America's wealth, deny American exceptionalism, and drag the US down. Like all socialists before him, he neither understands nor values wealth production or its producers. So his policies, ostensibly aimed at a more equal distribution of wealth and power, inevitably work toward equally distributing poverty and helplessness.
