It’s only a paper moon

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
16 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

You just gotta feel for poor Barack Obama, so misunderstood, so misquoted, so taken out of context. And it so keeps on happening. Over and over. It almost smacks of a malicious design to misrepresent. Take the latest instance, for instance.

There was Obama’s own hand-picked (first African- American) NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, telling Al Jazeera that Obama himself stressed to him that henceforth NASA’s principal goals are to encourage children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and “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.”

Here we ought to remind ourselves that NASA is the acronym for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, lumbered with such mundane uninspiring chores as space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research. Obama is evidently out to alter emphases. But when Bolden spelled it out, White House and NASA spokespersons rushed to explain that nothing is exactly what it seems. Improving relations with Muslim countries, they averred, is NASA’s mission, though it needn’t be counted as its “foremost responsibility.” Appearances plainly supersede substance. No fault is found with the fact that “outreach to Muslims” at all features on NASA’s to-do list, as long as it’s not perceived as the top item on said list.

Often, as in this case, Obama gets away with skewing the agenda of the world’s sole superpower. His fervent fans acclaim any oddball initiative as sophisticated pluralism and moral-relativist broad-mindedness. For regular folks, the preposterousness Obama promotes is so egregious they cannot imagine any of it is for real.

The reasonable inclination is to brush off assorted Obama administration absurdities as meaningless chatter, overblown nonsense or tendentious reporting. NASA’s outreach to Muslims is readily dismissed as a one-off bit of trivial blandishment meant to make nice and soothe the savage by pretending he’s really a savant.

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