Pirate's Cove

It’s amazing: a web top of the front page analysis, and the word “Biden” appears nowhere in the piece. It’s like there’s no president (you can see the piece reproduced here, to avoid the paywall)

Balloon Incident Reveals More Than Spying as Competition With China Intensifies

It may be months before American intelligence agencies can compare the audacious flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the country to other intrusions on America’s national security systems, to determine how it ranks.

After all, there is plenty of competition.

There was the theft of the designs of the F-35, enabling the Chinese air force to develop its own look-alike stealth fighter, with Chinese characteristics. There was the case of China’s premier hacking team lifting the security clearance files for 22 million Americans from the barely secured computers of the Office of Personnel Management. That, combined with stolen medical files from Anthem and travel records from Marriott hotels, has presumably helped the Chinese create a detailed blueprint of America’s national security infrastructure.

But for pure gall, there was something different about the balloon. It became the subject of public fascination as it floated over nuclear silos of Montana, then was spotted near Kansas City and met its cinematic end when a Sidewinder missile took it down over shallow waters off the coast of South Carolina. Not surprisingly, now it is coveted by military and intelligence officials who desperately want to reverse-engineer whatever remains the Coast Guard and the Navy can recover.

It was basically China saying “we triple dog dare you to do something about it”, and Biden chickened out. He just let it roam.

“We don’t know what the intelligence yield was for the Chinese,” Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown professor who advised President Barack Obama on China and Asia with the National Security Council. “But there is no doubt it was a gross violation of sovereignty,” something the Chinese object to vociferously when the United States flies over and sails through the islands China has built from sandbars in the South China Sea.

“And this made visceral the China challenge,” Mr. Medeiros said, “to look up when you are out walking your dog, and you see a Chinese spy balloon in the sky.”

Good job, Joe. Way to protect the U.S.

As it turns out, it was hardly the first time. Hours before the giant balloon met its deflated end, the Pentagon said there was another one in flight, over South America. And it noted a long history of Chinese balloons flying over the United States (which the Pentagon, somehow, never wanted to talk about before, until this incident forced it to).

News outlets keep running this, but, they aren’t able to provide a shred of substantiation. At one point, reporters would have demanded extraordinary proof for extraordinary claims. Now, if it helps to protect a Democrat, they’ll just run with it. Anyhow, nations spy on each other all the time

Few experts doubt that had the situation been reversed, China would have used force — it has threatened to do that when it believed outsiders were entering disputed waters, much less established Chinese territory.

But, when a nation gets caught, there are consequences. Does anyone think China wouldn’t have shot it down immediately?

1,347 words, 25 paragraphs, and not one mention of the President of the United States, like he wasn’t involved in this at all. But, since he blew out for Delaware Friday, then took another long fossil fueled trip on Saturday to Syracuse and then to Camp David, well, perhaps he isn’t.