Back to the Moon

I tend to find the Rachel Maddow Show a bit irritating to watch. It has too much setup for my taste, even when the payoff is interesting. And that was true last night (transcript here), but I do appreciate the way she used the recent announcement by Vice President Mike Pence — that NASA will return to the moon by 2024 — as an example of the way the Mulligan administration makes pronouncements it has no intention of fulfilling.

To support that case, she presented JFK's 1962 "to the moon" speech, and also this graph, showing how much our country spent on the space race then vs. now and the time in between:


(Click to enlarge.)

Note that we are no longer spending anywhere near that much, and that there has been no ramp-up since Mulligan took office. And also (according to the Maddow transcript), the new Mulligan budget cuts NASA further, rather than increasing it, including specific programs that would be of use in returning to the moon.

Maddow then gave examples of other announcements Mulligan has made that were basically b.s. American steel is now required in U.S. pipelines! Everybody gets magic health care! North Korea is denuclearized! We will have rural broadband!

And I have to say, it made me think of the 2005 film Idiocracy. I know that's not an original observation, but I don't focus on this aspect of his presidency very often. Will he really get away with saying things are true that have direct effects on people's lives and which are observably not true? You do not have government-paid health care, most likely (especially if the Republicans roll back the various Medicaid expansions). Rural areas do not have broadband suddenly.

"Getting away with it," in this case, equals winning the Electoral College again, carrying the popular vote in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I don't believe it, but then I am a Pollyanna from way back.

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Late addition:

Or this, for instance: