title:  Fox News Host Makes Herself A Total Laughingstock In Attempted Dig At NASA (TWEETS)
text: Fox News host Greta Van Susteren saw an opportunity to use NASA to take a jab at  big government  that is equal parts confused and stupid. It did not go well.NASA recently released some incredibly stunning photographs of Pluto, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft during its once in a lifetime flyby of the (dwarf) planet in 2015. The tiny spacecraft took close to ten years to arrive to Pluto and now heads out even deeper into what is called the Kuiper Belt, a collection of  ancient icy mini-worlds  at the far reaches of what we would consider our solar system.Only the technical feat and stunning photographs weren t good enough for Van Susteren. She was upset that NASA took so long, and seized the opportunity to rail against NASA using American tax dollars while not delivering its photos into Greta s inbox faster than the speed of light.Why did they wait until NOW to release these? pics taken in 2015 and we pay their salaries in tax dollars https://t.co/hhXxrfsWEr  Greta Van Susteren (@greta) June 1, 2016It s clear that Van Susteren didn t bother to read the article she linked to, or she may have found her answer. It wasn t a vast government cover-up to hide images of Pluto from the taxpayers. It was the fact that Pluto is really, really far away and the data takes a very long time to trickle in.Though the encounter took place more than 10 months ago, New Horizons is still beaming flyby data home, and likely won t be done doing so until this coming fall, mission team members have said.Van Susteren s goal seemed to be to slam the Obama administration for cutting NASA s budget, a critique that is both laughably off-base and not the issue. As one Twitter user patiently explained to Van Susteren, demanding a low power spacecraft to send high-resolution images back faster is like getting 9 women pregnant in the hopes of making a baby in a month. That s not how any of this works. (In any case, the New Horizons spacecraft launched in 2006, three years before Obama sent Fox News into a rage frenzy about  responsible  government.)There s no question that NASA has been hamstrung by its dwindling budget, but its financial woes have nothing to do with Obama. Republicans in Congress, eager to kill anything that even smells like it could support climate change, have repeatedly tried to dismantle the space agency s budget over allegations that the data it collects is biased against climate deniers. This death by attrition has meant the shuttering of the manned space shuttle program, as well as cutbacks in cutting-edge research. Instead, Republicans have told NASA to focus more on space   a vague directive if there ever was one   and not on Earth. And like any good hostage taker, to show they were serious, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology (a misnomer considering how anti-science the committee is) went ahead and slashed an additional $320 million.Van Susteren s network has, of course, acted as the Republican Party s cheerleader through all of this. Routinely, Fox News will feature thinly veiled hit pieces on science and research in order to  prove  that spending government money on such endeavors is a waste. Much better, they argue, to waste that money on fighting a losing legal battle for the right to discriminate against transgender children. Or on fighter jets that don t work.However at this rate, getting a person like Greta Van Susteren to see the hypocrisy in her jabs at NASA and Obama might take longer than a trip to Pluto and back.Featured image via Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images