About two-hundred years ago, our enemies The Rooskies put an alive dog in a space capsule and shot it into orbit, for laughs. Russians have a very dark sense of humor. But Americans -- especially the kind of Americans who run things, in Washington -- do not have any sense of humor at all. Instead of coming up with something even more ridiculous, like putting a cat in a submarine or setting Elvis Presley on fire, the Americans freaked out and said "Good Gravy we have got to also send some unwanted little creatures into space," so they captured John Glenn and next thing you know Tom Wolfe was selling the movie rights toThe Right Stuff and half a century later it's almost impossible to remember that by the 21st Century we would most definitely have human space colonies all over the Solar System and mod orbital sex resorts. Anyway, Obama says today is our "Sputnik Moment," even though that was pretty clearly 53 years ago. It's like Obama doesn't even know how to use Wikipedia, probably because he's afraid it will leak all over the place.

The news websites are all posting some variation of this right now:

“In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind,” the president said in a speech at Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “If this is truly going to be our Sputnik moment, we need a commitment to innovation we haven’t seen since President Kennedy challenged us to go to the moon.”

Nice of him to drop by DeVry and let all these future Best Buy clerks know about the future, but "our Sputnik moment" still was a half century ago. We don't need another Sputnik moment.

And Kennedy wasn't president in 1957. Nor was he president when Sputniks 2 (the first one with the dog, the brave/sacrificial Laika), or 4 or 5 or 6 launched. (Sputnik 3 failed.)

It was the successful launch and orbit of Vostok 1 in April 1961 -- with first-ever cosmonaut/astronaut Yuri Gagarin aboard -- that pushed Kennedy to announce a manned moon landing by the end of the decade. So, it was a Vostok moment, not a Sputnik moment. Go to hell, Obama. (We are younger than you and lack your millions of dollars and Predator Drones to kill poor people and yet we know these things. But all you did as a child was watch teevee sitcom shows about idiots, and this is according to your autobiography.)

Anyway Obama wants the people at the community college to make some futuristic thing, maybe a talking dildo. It will save America, in its own peculiar way. [Bloomberg/AFP]