The next head of NASA is likely to be an ex-Navy fighter pilot turned Republican congressman who believes strongly in space exploration but is skeptical about man-made climate change.

What’s not to like about about Trump’s nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) for the job of NASA’s administrator?

Everything, if you’re a liberal.

According to New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi, Trump just blew the perfect chance to change his “presidency from the chaotic mess of threats, bitterness and bilious paranoia to one of rationality and reasonableness.”

Apparently, the job should have gone to a fully-fledged climate alarmist.

There is no denying that our weather is getting more severe, that the oceans are rising, the Arctic ice is melting and hurricanes are wreaking ever-more havoc each time one pummels another part of the country. Harvey has officially brought the most destructive rainfall in our nation’s history — more than 51 inches in some areas of Houston. As many as 42,399 humans are in shelters. Yet in the face of all this, you, Mr. President, have chosen to nominate a climate change-denying partisan politician, Republican Rep. Jim Bridenstine, to head NASA. How can you even think of such a man. As this planet heats up, we have to look to space. That won’t be done if the man heading NASA denies the science and looks down on the truth of what’s happening in our atmosphere.

It would be nice to dismiss this as merely the deranged frothings of a rent-an-opinion, left-wing columnist who has bizarrely chosen to borrow her surname from that of the secret police in former Communist East Germany. Unfortunately, she’s by no means the exception. Most liberals think as she does.

Indeed, so do quite a few establishment conservatives.

According to Florida Senator Marco Rubio – who insists that his criticisms have nothing to do with the fact that Bridenstine trashed him as being soft on terrorism during the presidential primaries – Bridenstine is too partisan a figure for the job.

Rubio told Politico:

“It’s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it’s at a critical juncture in its history,” Rubio said. “I would hate to see an administrator held up — on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes, or statements made in the past — because the agency can’t afford it and it can’t afford the controversy.”

Wait just a second. NASA “a federal mission which has largely been free of politics”? What planet is Rubio living on??

NASA became SO politicized under the Obama administration it might as well have been renamed Greenpeace.

In 2010, NASA’s then administrator Charles Bolden claimed in an interview with Al-Jazeera that President Obama now considered one of the organization’s primary missions to be Muslim outreach:

Bolden said in the interview that Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships 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.”

Political enough for you, Senator Rubio?

Then, of course, there’s the hijacking of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies by a bunch of climate alarmists, formerly led by James “Death Trains” Hansen, now led by the equally parti-pris Gavin “Toast” Schmidt.

For years, NASA has been fraudulently tampering with the temperature data “on an unbelievable scale”.

The sooner it gets back to its day job – clue: National Aeronautics And Space Administration – the better for the U.S. taxpayer, the better for space exploration, the better for science.

Bridenstine sounds just the man for the job: