Despite the confusing double negative in the caption, White House spokesbuffoon Robert Gibbs is denying that the White House tasked the NASA administrator with Muslim outreach.
[Update a while later]
Keith Cowing is far too credulous of the White House spokesbuffoon. If I have to choose between the credibility of a decorated Marine General, or the guy who said he never heard any anti-semitism in twenty years of holding down one of Jeremiah Wright’s pews, I know who I believe.
If he wants to keep his job, Bolden’s really going to need to learn to talk more like a politician and be more careful about how he phrases things.
Or he’s going to have to come to understand that, in this administration, you are only useful until you’re not, and then you get a big fat mouthful of under-bus.
Bolden could have a written memo from Obama, or a video-recorded conversation proving that Bolden was telling the truth about the new direction, but he’d still be thrown under the bus for making them public.
I’d keep a close eye on both the bus AND train schedules if I were Bolden. Assuming it’s not already too late, of course.
This is so fargin’ high-larious! I wonder which one is telling the truth (if either).
What’s almost as funny is the use of the “under the bus” metaphor for the NASA administrator’s predicament. I guess “under the shuttle” doesn’t really work, of course.
He’s been thrown under the shuttle bus.
Too obvious?
What is particularly interesting is all of the people who defended the original focus on outreach as if the word had been given and we must all worship the word. Now they are left with a big fat “oh never mind”.
I wonder if the typical MSM ‘news’ consumer has a clue what this latest White House denial is even about?
Cowing takes the word of the White House mouthpiece over the word of a decorated Marine? Color me shocked.
I wonder how he would have responded were this say Ari Fleischer vs [enter name of some USMC critic of Bush admin]?
With Obama’s “critic under bus” modus operandi history, even his own typical white grandmother, who is really surprised by this development?
Cowing can’t find any evidence of Bolden’s orders in the various places he looked. What about Obama’s legendary “Cairo Speech,” in which he patronizingly complimented Islam by citing accomplishments not actually attributable to them? By itself, this indicates that the President is trying to do just what Bolden says he was instructed to do.
Why in the world would Bolden make something like that up? He’s a good soldier, and has been carrying out orders from the CINC that he clearly doesn’t agree with, but obeys anyway.
Yep, he’s been thrown under the bus.
Last week Keith was pontificating, or “arm waving”, how this “Muslim Mission” policy was old hat. Why all the fuss now he proclaimed? Bolden was saying nothing new, this had been stated months before by others. He hammered the “far right” and “Fox News” for pushing a tired old story for political gain.
Now he’s saying that the tired old story is false? How is it that this is old news that others had stated prior to Bolden but that the POTUS knew nothing about and had no hand in creating? Why did Gibbs distance the BHO admin from the policy when it was mouthed by all those others previously?
Semites are the sons of Shem which includes Arabs. However, a coworker coming back from Saudi Arabia told me they felt Arabs were the legitimate sons of Abraham and the Jews were not… So Wright wasn’t technically being anti-semitic since the jews aren’t legitimate. …or some twisted logic like that.
philw1776 wrote “I wonder if the typical MSM ‘news’ consumer has a clue what this latest White House denial is even about?”
Probably not. I think it was one of the guys over at National Review who did a list of MSM outlets that didn’t cover any of the original outreach idea, so if Bolden ends up out of his job as a result of this kerfluffle, those consumers will have to be brought up to speed on the backstory. Not the first time (this year, even!) something like this has happened, of course.
Yes, it looks like he is being set up for it. Which makes you wonder…
Is it President Obama is getting ready to reverse his space policy and end the battle with the Congress over it? Recall how many times candidate Obama changed his policy on space during the campaign relative to public reaction to it.
The next month or two will be interesting.
Is it President Obama is getting ready to reverse his space policy and end the battle with the Congress over it?
That’s what you want, isn’t it?
The Gibbs statement is a bit more nuanced than that. He was asked if Bolden “had to *focus* on outreach to the Muslim world” and responded “that was not his task, and that’s not *the* task of NASA.”
What Bolden said in the interview was that he had been asked to do three things. He didn’t say that he was *only* asked to do those things, or that he was asked to focus on one of them as as *the* task of NASA. It’s pretty clear from his budget statement that the three goals he mentioned were only a subset of a larger group of goals he was expected to accomplish: he was only mentioning the ones most relevant to the interview audience.
Will, Bolden made it seem like the three he mentioned were the TOP priorities, with the last (the Muslim outreach) being the most important. Now maybe the general misspoke, and maybe it isn’t a real high priority item, but that’s what it sounded like. Either it’s how the President meant it to be and now Obama has decided to back track, or the general shot his mouth off. Either way, Bolden’s prospects for political don’t look good.
Insofar as he gave the impression that those three goals were NASA’s top three, he misspoke. A quick glance at his budget shows that education is one of NASA’s bottom three priorities.
I’m having a hard time getting very upset about a statement that was apparently literally correct, but might mislead careless Al-Jazeera listeners into thinking that outreach to Muslims might be higher on NASA’s priority list than, say #8.
How is it that this is old news that others had stated prior to Bolden but that the POTUS knew nothing about and had no hand in creating?
Logic? You’re attempting to use reason with regard to the left?