TV News LIES

Reality makes rubble of fiction.

Our implausible world can take almost any topic or subject, skewer it, spin it around in its rotisserie barbecue:  give it a few and, voila!  Everything goes out a nice, golden brown.

Just like Meals, Ready to Eat, or MREs -- field rations for military members in the familiar brown plastic packets, for example. The meals are popular with survivalists, campers, hunters, and others away from their ranges-in-home, let alone from antelope playing near the 'fridge.

Wiki tells us the U.S. government requires the following information be printed on each MRE case:  U.S. Government Property, Commercial Resale is Unlawful.

So, what's the implausibility here?  It's not true.

Sometimes, everything really IS rocket science. Even for NASA, nothing in life is a given, no matter how many successes, and no matter how high the zenith or how far the apogee.

Witness the crash of a moon lander in a recent test, an embarassing oops! after so many wins, the most recent -- and perhaps most extraordinary in some time -- the safe landing of the one-ton rover Curiosity on Mars.

For cosmic tire-kickers, NASA's Mars rovers were always special.  Then, Curiosity came along:  twice as long and five times heavier.  The mission was like shot-putting a Mini Cooper 352 million miles, then perfectly hitting an entry window to the planet -- a zone measuring about 3 by 19 kilometers, a microscopic target after that long a distance.

You hit the thin atmosphere at 13,200 miles an hour -- 3-point-7 miles per second -- a real need to slow down, fast:  enter friction and deployed heat shield, then 'chute, slowing from 900 miles an hour to 180 in just two minutes, then sky crane, to surface.

There's nothing like a spectacular success to bring out the hordes of troglodyte critics in droves. The very second NASA's car-sized rover, Curiosity, was safely set down on Mars last week, the drumbeats of money agony were begun by umpteen tribes of assorted knuckle draggers.

Leave it to the myopic to miss this:  NASA's budget is less than 1% of the federal budget.  The most expensive "space program" we all pay for in this country is the vacuum between the ears of confused and ignorant people.

You have to hand it to Willard Romney:  Whenever he needs to make a clutch play, and reach right in and pull a rabbit out of his hat, he always reaches right in and confidently pulls out roadkill instead.

That big-eyed deer staring into the headlights at Willard's side, about to be figuratively mounted on history's grillwork, is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin).  He's the one who the fun-loving people on the Romney tour bus have dangled onto the roadway, in the lane of oncoming traffic, as new veep road sport.

Mitt Romney stood in front of the battleship USS Wisconsin to announce his VP choice. It really was fitting that he stood in front of a ship that was obsolete and useless when it was built, just like the Ryan budget.

Also fitting was that he stood in front of a ship that Ronald Reagan dragged out of mothballs and fooled away billions of dollars on. Reagan did this in order to mask the collapsing economy he was creating with his trickle down voodoo economics.

Reagan added 400 ships to the Navy built around the four Iowa class floating money drains to "confront the Soviets". He did this because the Evil Empire had secret nuclear submarines, according to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The CIA said no they didn't, but that only meant the Russians were keeping them secret.