I was a guest on last night’s Outsiders show in Australia. The hosts had a merry time laughing at Joe Biden and his administration, as well they should. Biden’s goofy balloon policy–sit back for a week while an admitted Chinese spy balloon traverses the country, then start shooting down weather and hobby balloons, one of them apparently launched by a club called the the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade–is emblematic of what must be the most incompetent administration since the mid-19th century.
This morning on Meet the Press, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed the irrationality of the administration’s conduct:
[W]hat I can also tell you is this was an opportunity to speak very clearly and very directly about the fact that China sent a surveillance balloon over our territory, violating our sovereignty, violating international law. And I told [Wang Yi] quite simply that that was unacceptable and can never happen again.
But–to ask the obvious–if sending a spy balloon across America is “unacceptable” and “can never happen again,” why was it allowed to happen the first time? The Chinese balloon could have been shot down over the Aleutians, over Canada (as the Bottlecap Balloon Brigade’s balloon was), or over Montana. Instead, it was allowed to cruise across America for a week, finally to be destroyed after it had completed its mission.
The administration’s actions make no sense, and can only reflect an alarming degree of disarray and dysfunction.
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