Biden also doesn’t like being challenged. We’ve seen how he’s yelled at voters and reporters when he doesn’t like what they have to say, everything from calling voters “fat” and “full of sh*t” to calling Fox’s Peter Doocy a “stupid son of a b**ch.” That’s a lifelong problem going back to at least the 1988 presidential race where he made up all kinds of things about himself when he felt challenged.
So how does that translate now to policy, when he’s chastised for not dealing appropriately with the Chinese spy balloon and allowing it to fly across the country for a week, even over sensitive military installations? We saw how suddenly they were trying to deflect to blame the Trump administration for not responding to previous incursions. We saw a false story about when they first started tracking the balloon which was much earlier than when they said (so they should have been able to take it down before it breached our space).
We also saw Biden order the takedown of three objects which the administration now says they believe were benign balloons. That was likely as a response to the backlash for his weak-kneed response to the spy balloon, to make him appear tougher. They also stopped the recovery of the objects rather quickly, perhaps because they realized recovering a $12 balloon project wouldn’t look like a good use of a $400,000 missile.
The Biden team claimed they shot down the other objects because they were in the path of civilian aviation. So they were slow to shoot down the spy balloon but swift to shoot down the objects. Then nothing. Did all the other objects suddenly disappear? Martha Raddatz asks a good question: Why?
Are they no longer considering weather balloons a threat even though there are hundreds of them across the U.S., she asked. But he doesn’t answer the question.
At Pres. Biden’s direction, U.S. has put in place “policy parameters for when we would take lethal action against an object to shoot it down,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan tells @MarthaRaddatz after Chinese surveillance balloon shot down. https://t.co/FGXdCH9qAk pic.twitter.com/U6FNgA6QuT
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 26, 2023
Sullivan did say that Biden had asked them to consider “policy parameters” to put in place for how to deal with objects, “for when we would take lethal action against an object to shoot it down.” So are they telling us they didn’t have any policy parameters before this? Somehow I don’t believe that. I think this is about overreaction and even this “parameter” business is about trying to tell us he’s doing “something.” Because truly, if they had no parameter before this, they’re incompetent and they’ve exposed us to God knows what.
Meanwhile, I hesitate to think what China must be taking away from all this when first Biden first doesn’t react and then downplays their incursion of our airspace, saying he didn’t seek conflict with them after they spied on us. That might explain why they’re now putting their heads together with Russia. Bad choices can have bad results, as can weakness.
