You often hear people say you can't have a country without borders. You can't have a country if you don't have borders, but that's also true of airspace, which is itself a kind of border. So, maintaining control of the skies over the United States – deciding who comes in and out and on what terms – that's one of the most basic duties of the Pentagon and has been since aviation began.
If you were to fly your Cessna into restricted airspace in parts of this country, the U.S. military would scramble jets and they might shoot you down. So, it's not a small infraction unless, of course, you happen to be the Chinese government, and you're operating in an enormous white dirigible designed to spy on American nuclear installations. In that case, you could relax. You've got friends at the White House. Absolutely nothing is going to happen to you.
Now, that's not an imaginary scenario. We're not guessing. We know it's true because we're seeing it right now. As you've doubtless heard, an enormous spy balloon, the size of several school buses, has floated over from central China. It's currently, we think, drifting across the continental United States. Yesterday, it passed over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. That's one of only three places in this country that houses minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
By this afternoon, that Chinese spy balloon had made it to Kansas City, and there over the skies of that city, a pilot flying a private plane at 47,000 feet came close to hitting the Chinese spy balloon. "Derelict balloon adrift," he said in a notice to other nearby pilots. But it was not a derelict balloon. It was a balloon being controlled by China.
WHITE HOUSE: BIDEN CHOSE NOT TO SHOOT DOWN CHINESE SPY BALLOON, BUT KEEPING 'ALL OPTIONS ON TABLE'
In other words, here we have a foreign military aircraft over our country spying on our critical defense installations and posing a threat to civilian aviation. That seems like a big deal. If you want to know how big of a deal, consider, how would we respond if Putin were doing this, if this were a Russian spy balloon?
Well, you'd have the world's shortest news story: "Russian spy balloon spotted offshore shore, entire U.S. Air Force mobilized, balloon reduced to vapor in seconds." So, there would not be a lot of debate about what to do about a Russian spy balloon. We'd kill it instantly, as you would any hostile foreign intrusion. But things turn out to be a little different when it's a Chinese spy balloon.
As far as we know, Vladimir Putin has never sent cash to Joe Biden's crackhead son. He probably should have. That would have been a very wise investment in retrospect. The Chinese government, long thinking as always, did send cash to Joe Biden's crack head son and apparently to Joe Biden himself and that paid off. Watch some robot from the Pentagon tell you that you have no right to know anything about this Chinese spy balloon. You think you're a citizen or something? Here it is.
REPORTER: The position of the balloon classified?
BRIG. GEN. PATRICK RYDER, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: Phil, right now, what we're not going to do is get into an hour-by-hour location of the balloon. Again, we're monitoring it closely. As I mentioned, right now, it's over the center of the continental United States. That's about as specific as I'm going to get.
REPORTER: I understand it might be inconvenient, but does the public not have a right to know..?
RYDER: The public certainly has the ability to look up in the sky and see where the balloon is.
CHINA CONFIRMS BALLOON IS THEIRS, AS SPOKESPERSON CLAIMS IT IS CIVILIAN RESEARCH AIRSHIP
The public has the right to look at the sky. Go stare at the sun. That's what the guy just said.
What you didn't hear was a lecture about how the Chinese military is a threat to our democracy and our American way of life. It's not like the Chinese invaded Ukraine. No, just our country. So, no big deal. Stop asking questions.
Joe Biden, of course, took that very same position today. Watch:
BIDEN: Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging. Inflation was rising. We weren't manufacturing a damn thing here. We were in real economic difficultly. That's why I don't.
REPORTERS: Mr. President. Mr. President....
Notice the coms smiles. Walk this way, Mr. President. They knew they weren't going to answer questions on that and it raises a much bigger question, which is why? What's going on here? What else do they know but refuse to tell us?
Well, today, Pentagon sources conceded that the Biden administration has actually been tracking this Chinese spy balloon for months since it left China. That means they watched it float over the Pacific. They watched it pass over the Aleutian Islands and into American airspace and at any time, they could have shot it down over the water, by the way, risking no life on the ground. but they didn't do that. Why didn't they do that? No one will say.
Instead, the trusty Pentagon robot offered this explanation. This is one of the dumbest explanations ever articulated from a podium in Washington. Here it is:
AFTER CHINESE BALLOON ENTERS US AIRSPACE, BIDEN SECRETARY OF STATE POSTPONES TRIP TO CHINA
REPORTER: You said that this is violating our airspace, so why not take it down?
RYDER: We assess that it does not pose a risk to people on the ground as it currently is traversing the continental United States and so out of an abundance of caution, cognizant of the potential impact to civilians on the ground from a debris field right now, we're going to continue to monitor and review options.
So, the U.S. military is, in fact, protecting you by letting a Chinese spy balloon hover over our nuclear facilities. That is, in total, an insultingly ridiculous series of sentences. They make no sense. But the administration's position on the Chinese spy balloon becomes not just ridiculous, but scary when you learn that this is not the first Chinese spy balloon. Other Chinese spy balloons have flown over this country, and the Pentagon didn't shoot them down either.
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Now, you probably didn't know that because nobody told the public about it. The existence of those Chinese spy balloons was classified. Apparently, it still is classified. Joe Biden's Pentagon briefers didn't say a word about it today, as you just saw and by the way, it's not just Chinese spy balloons over this country. It's many other countries.
Nearly identical Chinese spy balloons have been dispatched by the Chinese military into the airspace of Japan and India and the Philippines and in at least one case, probably all cases, at least one we know of, over a military installation. So, Chinese spy balloons are actually kind of expensive to make and there's a diplomatic risk in deploying them over other people's airspaces. We're seeing that happen now.
So, you don't do this on a whim. Hey, let's send spy balloons over the United States. You do it for a reason. The question is, what's the reason? We're going to try to get to the bottom of it, if we can.
