Shamelessly pinched from here.
The story that NASA is being re-purposed as an agency of Muslim self-esteem broke while I was away, so everyone's already had good fun with it, especially vanderleun ("One of these days, Islam...right to the moon!").
Well... I s'pose if we're ending the shuttle program and the moon and Mars programs (so much for that Gerard), the agency has to do... something.
Most folks are dwelling on why we'd want to share any rocket science with people committed to blowing us up, which indeed shows questionable judgment.
But I mean to say... how benighted is it to give an agency peopled with "right stuff" fly-boys on the one hand and physicists and engineers on the other the job of raising people's self-esteem? I know when I hang out with a room full of cocky, physically perfect smarty-pantses, I always feel better about myself. And considering the disproportionate number of math and physics geniuses with Asperger's Syndrome, we've just entrusted a delicate field of human relations to people with difficulty picking up social cues. Brilliant!
That's not my real beef, though. What truly angers me about the policy is that the President continues to breech the genuine wall against establishment of religion. If he were reaching out to the Arab world, that would make sense. Why is he reaching out only to persons of a particular religion? So Christians in the Middle East or Buddhists in Indonesia or Hindus in Pakistan wouldn't be eligible for any NASA programs that develop?
The man is creating distinctions of persons that ought not to exist and which are antithetical to our founding principles. The United States is a political entity engaging with other political entities. It has no standing to engage a religion, unless we now consider ourselves a religion (maybe there's more to this Obama-worship than we thought?). It's deeply offensive.
Here is NASA administrator Charles Bolden's speech in Cairo last month. It's a lot of one-world palaver, but --here's that cultural sensitivity kicking in?-- I notice he talks about the International Space Station and then throws in, "but, hey, you guys have the pyramids as an impressive achievement."
The pyramids are, um, not Islamic. If the Taliban ruled Egypt, they'd blow 'em up.
