Mind-Boggling if True

You really have to hope that NASA Chief Charles Bolden was just blowing smoke up Al-Jazeera's butt and that this isn't true. The ever-vigilant Andrew Malcolm at the L. A. Times reports on what Bolden said to Al-Jazeera last week:

When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me 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.

The "he" in this instance is President Barack Obama, of course. So why on earth (pun intended) would the head of the space agency be placed in the hybrid role of goodwill ambassador and Bill Nye the Science Guy? And more importantly, why hasn't anyone in the MSM other than Malcolm (who is a columnist/blogger for the L.A. Times) reported anything about this story? One theory -- offered here:

The reason the MSM has the lid on NASA's new "mission" to snuggle up to Islam (in between decapitations and floggings) is that it would be devastating to Obama if it became known. On the surface, the new NASA "mission" seems merely screwball, and thus a small story. But I think it's a good deal more than that. It shows that Obama's thinking is unrecognizable to the average person. It also shows that he's unserious -- frivolous, really -- about something that made a generation of Baby Boomers take pride in their country. How many millions of people sat in their junior high auditoriums and watched the Alan Shepherd and John Glenn launches? How many millions more were up at midnight on July 20, 1969 to watch the first human being, an American, put his foot on the moon?

When the domestic roots of skepticism about America (and sometimes flat-out anti-Americanism) were being laid -- in the 60's assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the exposure of the country's treatment of blacks -- the one thing in which we all took pride was the space program. So for Obama, it's now one thing that needs to be perverted. Making it a dumbed-down PR front for Islam is, in its way, a genius move for this purpose. But as the MSM recognizes by its silence, it's a bridge too far.

That's a very harsh assessment, but can we reject it out of hand? Like I said, I hope Bolden was just blowing smoke up Al-Jazeera's butt.