In a goof gone viral, US Vice President Mike Pence touched something he should not have as he visited NASA headquarters, and his defense smacked of something his boss might do — blame somebody else.
Pence was at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Thursday for a speech to employees and also took a tour.
At one point Pence was guided to piece of gear with a sign that identified it as “critical space flight hardware” and a warning in bright, red capital letters: “DO NOT TOUCH.”
Photo: Reuters
Pence placed his left palm flat on it anyway, as cameras clicked away.
One of the people in the picture is US Senator Marco Rubio.
The rest is meme and tweet history.
Pence sent out a tweet on Friday in which he said he was sorry — a blurb with a US President Donald Trump-style exclamation point at the end — and joked that he, Pence, was not really to blame for ignoring the sign, which his hand almost touches.
“Sorry @NASA ... @MarcoRubio dared me to do it!,” Pence wrote.
NASA put out a tweet saying it was no big deal, that the hardware — a big piece of metal roughly the shape of a nuclear reactor cooling tower and part of a spacecraft-in-the-making called the Orion 3 — needed to be cleaned, anyway.
Pence put out another light-hearted tweet saying it was not the first time this happened: It featured his photo of NASA ignominy, but with a porcupine — not the space gear — graced by his hand. Of course, the original photograph went viral and many social media users were scathing in their criticism of Pence.
Pence supporters said the former were making a big deal out of nothing.
“Good to know our vice president has the self control of a sugar charged 3rd grader on a field trip,” wrote someone with the handle @KentoTFH.
“Again administration blaming someone else,” @PatStevens2 wrote, referring to Pence’s blaming of Rubio.
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