Can you retract a blowjob? Whenever you hear the sound of typing coming from Elisabeth Bumiller's office, expect to see George W. Bush emerge a few minutes later wearing a half-dazed grin, his face covered all over with big lipstick smoochies.

I cringe whenever I see Bumiller's byline on one of the Times's "White House [Love] Letters," so it's a bit surprising I missed her Slurpee of the 12th: and while it's not really in this blog's mandate to do the Daily Howler thing (Bob Somerby has that beat covered), the Mars adventure has gotten under my skin and I can't let Bumiller's version of it pass uncommented:

Sixteen years [after his Dad derided the notion of "the vision thing"], the second President Bush has inherited his father's syntax but not his cautious goals ... As last week proved again, this president has embraced not only "the vision thing" but the idea of a very big presidency: big ideas, big costs, big gambles. More than many presidents, historians [which ones?] say, Mr. Bush seems to understand how to use the powers of the office and to see the political benefits in risk. He may leave the details to others, but when backed into a corner, he doubles his bets.

OK, OK, we get it—big, big, big! Criminey, somebody give the lady a Kleenex, willya?

I won't try to figure out what "corner" the Dear Leader finds himself backed into, nor what bets he's doubling on or how upping the ante's going to help him work his way out of that corner (maybe he's been backed in there by a bunch of angry gamblers). Let's be fair, it's tough to keep your eye on a metaphor when you're trying to wrap yourself around all that Texas-size manliness ...

But is there anything solid to be found in the thin gruel of Bumiller's mash note? We're supposed to believe:

• Bush I ("a one-term incrementalist") thought small where Bush II thinks big;
• except Bumiller herself admits that Daddy announced a moon-Mars combo mission too;
• but Bush 41 only offered destinations, not details, and Liz expects that Bush 43 is going to offer details, which means his thinking is bigger;
• except the Times' own subsequent reporting has emphasized the vagueness and lack of technical or budgetary detail in the 43 announcement;
• and besides, 41's plan suffered from being "hashed out at the White House, not NASA," the way (according to Bumiller) 43's is;
• except that presidential advisers have said, according to the WaPo, that the policy "emerged from a White House search for a bold goal that would help unify the nation before Bush's reelection race and portray him as a visionary."

I have to stop this, it's making my head hurt. So far as I can tell, there's nothing Bumiller asserts about President Second-Time-As-Farce's new Space Jam that's based in fact or holds up to any kind of scrutiny. She's an embarrassment, and the Times ought to dump her ass.

posted by michael  5:41:09 PM  
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Bush lied, Hubble died. Demonstrating once again that under Dubya, the reverse Midas principle isn't just a happy coincidence, it's policy:

[T]wo days after President Bush ordered NASA to redirect its resources toward human exploration of the Moon and Mars, the agency's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, told the managers of the space telescope that there would be no more shuttle visits to maintain it. ... Without any more visits, the telescope, the crown jewel of astronomy for 10 years, will probably die in orbit sometime in 2007.

NASA Cancels Trip to Supply Hubble, Sealing Early Doom

And for extra enjoyment, here's the stinger buried at the end of the story:

NASA is not completely off the hook as far as the Hubble is concerned. The agency is committed to bringing it back to Earth safely after its useful life ends. Until the Columbia accident, NASA had planned to retrieve the telescope with a shuttle and put it in the Smithsonian. Now the plan is to build a robotic rocket that would go up, attach itself to the telescope and fire its engine to brake Hubble out of orbit and drop it in the ocean.

Paradoxically, [a NASA science advisor] said, the cost of developing such a rocket, estimated at $300 million or more, would come out of the NASA astronomy budget. It is, he said, another double whammy.

So: Just as "Clear Skies" means more pollution, and "Healthy Forests" means more old-growth logging, Karl Rove's bold new leap into space means the end of actual space science—and the trashing of an enormous and still productive research investment.

When the so-called policymakers got busy renewing our national commitment to '50s sci-fi, do you think anybody bothered to draw President Dickhead's attention to the collateral damage? Then again—when did collateral damage ever matter to a Bush?

posted by michael  1:42:54 PM  
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