Remember this story? NASA director Charles Bolden, an Obama appointee, was told by the Obama Administration that the space agency’s new top priority is outreach to the Mohammedan world. From the original story:

When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — [Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way 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 math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.

Again, Bolden isn’t some holdover from the Bush Administration trying to make Barack Obama look bad. He was appointed by Obama in May 2009 and was confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate in July of the same year. Put simply, he has no reason to lie about the goals Obama set forth for NASA.

Well, this whole clusterfark spawned a political and media backlash. Americans wanted to know why the same agency once charged with landing a man on the moon now focuses on making Muslims feel good about their historical contributions. Shouldn’t the National Aeronautics and Space Administration focus on…space and aeronautics?

Long story short, the Obama Administration needed a way out of this PR disaster. So they have decided to throw Bolden under the bus.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden must have misspoke when he told Al Jazeera last month that one of his top priorities is to reach out to Muslim countries.

“That was not his task and that’s not the task of NASA,” Gibbs said.

Bolden, though, said last month in the interview that it was President Obama who gave him that task. He made a similar claim in February.

The White House also backed up Bolden last week when his remarks first stirred controversy. A White House spokesman last Tuesday said Obama wants NASA to engage with the world’s best scientists and that to meet that challenge, NASA must “partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries.”

NASA last week walked back Bolden’s claim that Muslim outreach was the “perhaps foremost” plank of his mission, saying that Bolden was merely talking about his “outreach” responsibilities and that space exploration is still NASA’s No. 1 job.

If only the White House hadn’t originally backed up his remark. Or, you know, if Obama hadn’t already canceled the program dedicated to returning Americans to the moon. Then I might believe the administration’s spin.

Bolden’s mistake was being honest and actually following the president’s directions. When the remarks generated too much heat for an already-embattled administration, Bolden was thrown under the bus.

The buck stops down the hallway, to the left, and up two flights of stairs.