Big Government Goes to Mars

Fresh from his oppression of millions of Godfearing chicken-loving Americans, President Obama is on the cusp of outsourcing his big-government solutions farther afield than ever – this time to the planet Mars.

As though any possible microorganisms didn’t have it hard enough ekeing out a living on that arid, irradiated and atmospherically minimal wasteland, in the wee hours of Monday morning Zulu time, a robotic rover 100 times larger than anything ever sent to wander across the surface of the red planet will engage in an unprecedentedly Rube-Goldbergesque landing procedure to drop a one-ton monstrosity onto a heretofore pristine desert (hypocrite much, Mr. No-Drilling-in-ANWR?)

Yet rather than do something useful like fracking, this elaborate government behemoth will wander around aimlessly, attempting to collect geological information and add to our scientific knowledge, a practice that has fallen into disrepute ever since it led to the preposterous conclusion that the earth is some billions of years older than the Bible says.

Criticism of the quixotic endeavor has already begun, as NRA President Wayne Lapierre has accused the administration of attempting to find life on other planets in order to take away their guns, and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio claiming that any life found on Mars could not actually have been born there. While voicing his suspicions about Martian life’s origins, he said he regretfully would not be sending any members of his posse to the planet any time soon to investigate personally, owing to the fourth planet’s evident lack of “LBBs – luaus, brothels and bars.”

And the Romney campaign weighed in with its own lamentation that the Curiosity mission’s so-called “Seven Minutes of Terror” as it descended to the Gale Crater meant not only that “Americans are now less safe, but also that Governor Romney feels the exploration of space is an activity the Constitution clearly leaves up to the states.”

Nevertheless, if the extremely complicated and risky mission turns out to be a success, all the above sources said that they were prepared to say that going ahead with the mission was “an obvious no-brainer” and that credit really belonged to the Bush-era underfunding of the space program.