WTF Without NASA, Mr. President?

April 2010, Obama was lying through his teeth talking to NASA employees, hoping to bamboozle them into voting Democrat, no doubt, in the midterm elections. From the BBC:

Barack Obama says it should be possible to send astronauts to orbit the planet Mars by the mid-2030s and return them safely to Earth. The US president made the claim in a major speech to staff and guests at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He was laying out the details of his new policy for the US space agency.

Forget the moon, says Obama! We're aiming for a Mars mission! So, imagine my surprise to read this today:

In its budget submitted to Congress on February 13, the Obama administration zeroed out funding for NASA’s future Mars-exploration missions. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, currently en route to the Red Planet and the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2013, will be sent, but that’s it. No funding has been provided for the Mars probes planned as joint missions in 2016 and 2018 with the European Space Agency, and nothing after that is funded either. This poses a grave crisis for the American space program.

One last orbiter and then...no funding whatsoever? How will this further your announced goal of manned missions to Mars? Was this just another in a long line of promises with an expiration date, Mr. Obama? Another line in a speech pandering to whatever audience you were in front of because it sounded good at the time?

It used to be a common rhetorical question, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we do ______?" My question is, if the government can funnel million of dollars to failing solar companies like Solyndra, that they know will fail, and millions of dollars for overseas companies to make electric cars and batteries, why can't we put a man on the moon any more?

When Obama talks about "Winning the Future", he's talking about future elections, not the future of our country. WTF.

He was laying (ab)out the details of his new policy for the US space agency.

There! Fixed it for you, Mr. Obama!

Update : I didn't think of it before (second cup of coffee hadn't kicked in), but in line with the political cartoon, maybe Mars won't be the only "Red planet"?

Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.