Vice President Mike Pence became the butt of the joke on Thursday, when he was pictured flouting a ‘do not touch’ sign during a trip to NASA.
The hilarious photo shows the VP touching a metal object at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, while the center’s director, Bob Cabana, and Sen. Marco Rubio look on.
Internet users went wild with the picture, posting dozens of memes about it on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram.
‘When you’re the VP they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the space probe. You can do anything,’ one Twitter user captioned the photo.
That comment was a reference to President Trump’s P****gate scandal, in which he was caught talking crassly about fondling women.
‘When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…grab them by the p****. You can do anything,’ Trump told Billy Bush in the leaked tape.
Other memes painted the vice president as a dunce who couldn’t read a simple sign.
Actor-turned-political activist Kal Pen even weighed in with a meme of his own.
‘Sir, the sign says-‘ the space center’s director tells Pence in the photo.
‘Ahhhh,’ Pence replies, touching the piece of equipment anyway.
Another meme compared Pence to the dimwitted Spongebob Squarepants character Patrick.
Others played the moment as an act of rebellion.
Playing off the popular ‘Thug Life’ internet meme, one Twitter user photo shopped the image to show wearing a pair of sunglasses and smoking marijuana.
During his trip to the space center on Thursday, Pence said it was time to usher in a ‘new era’ in American leadership in space.
Pence, who was recently named to head a government advisory body called the National Space Council, said the group would hold its first meeting ‘before the summer is out.’
He also toured NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to see progress in constructing a NASA spaceship destined for deep space and privately built capsules designed to send astronauts to low-Earth orbit in the coming years.
‘Our nation will return to the Moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,’ Pence told the cheering crowd of about 800 NASA employees, space experts and private contractors, but gave no specifics.
‘We did win the race to the Moon,’ he added, recalling the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s which sent men – one of whom, Buzz Aldrin, sat in the audience – to the surface of the Moon.
Join GhanaStar.com to receive daily email alerts of breaking news in Ghana. GhanaStar.com is your source for all Ghana News. Get the latest Ghana news, breaking news, sports, politics, entertainment and more about Ghana, Africa and beyond.