man-on-the-moon
Explanation
The Joke
A politician is giving a speech, trying to use the classic inspirational rhetoric: "I'm not so sure about this new proposal. You know, they said maybe you can put a man on the moon. Surely we can purchase a new jet!" Someone from the audience objects: "Over the line!" The politician then tries to backtrack, saying it's not accurate -- "We didn't put a man on the moon; we shot unmanned rockets of the necessary size and more." The audience reacts with a mix of booing and "ahhhhhh." In the final panel, we learn the politician isn't from our timeline -- they come from a world where we genuinely never put a man on the moon, and instead, all spaceflight milestones were achieved uncrewed. The punchline is: "If we can't even put a man on the moon, then surely we can't even fraudulently bill the office of the governor."
The Humor
The comic satirizes how politicians routinely invoke the moon landing as rhetorical shorthand for "we can do anything." Weinersmith imagines an alternate reality where the moon landing never happened, and shows how the entire structure of inspirational political rhetoric would collapse. Without the moon landing as a benchmark of human achievement, politicians would have to use humanity's failures as the basis for their arguments -- leading to the absurd inversion where "we couldn't even put a man on the moon" becomes a reason to expect continued incompetence rather than aspiration. It's a pointed commentary on how much lazy political rhetoric depends on a single achievement from 1969.
References
The comic references the Apollo 11 moon landing of July 20, 1969, which has become one of the most frequently cited examples of human achievement in political speeches, often invoked in the form "if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can..." to argue for the feasibility of various proposals.