White House counters NASA Muslim outreach remarks

The White House is contradicting the NASA administrator's claim that President Obama assigned him to reach out to Muslims on science matters.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently told Al-Jazeera that the "foremost" charge Obama gave him was "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 engineering." His words - not mine.

Now, today White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that such activities are NOT among Bolden's assigned tasks. Not only are they not "foremost" - they are not even on his list of tasks. Gibbs said administration officials have spoken with NASA about the matter.

Spoken with NASA??? So we are to believe that the head of NASA just went off to an interview, made up a directive from the President, called it his "foremost" directive from the President, and the President's response is to basically have a chat with him about it. Don't you think something like that would merit a firing? A reprimand? Something other than a chat? ......Unless Bolden was telling the truth.