Styx on "Balloongate"

You've heard by now that a large balloon was detected over American airspace. Speculation is that this is some sort of Chinese spy balloon, and it's apparently carrying enough equipment beneath it to be about as large as "two or three school buses," per one article. Other balloons have been sighted in Canada and Latin America. Nothing has been done to shoot the balloon down, although there have been reports of an explosion over Montana. Meanwhile, the balloon has been sighted moving into Missouri, and some authorities monitoring the situation say the reports of an explosion are false. This is the low-trust, post-reality world we live in now: you can't know what's real unless you see it for yourself.

The story raises a ton of questions. One Instapundit commenter noted that weather balloons don't have a long range. I Googled that claim and discovered that most weather balloons have a range of around 125 miles—which is nothing like the distance a balloon would have to travel to reach America from China. Other people are questioning whether anything short of a dirigible can carry equipment the size of several school buses. I wrote a comment openly wondering how no one seemed to have noticed the balloon when it crossed the US border. Another commenter—not responding to me—said that of course our defense forces would have noticed the thing as it crossed into US airspace, which raises the question of why nothing was done about the situation. If the balloon did manage to come all the way from China, then explaining why it's in US airspace is paramount. China actually said (see article) that the balloon did belong to it, but that it had no nefarious purpose (wink-wink). If the balloon was inflated and launched inside US borders (something I also noted in my Instapundit comment), then that gives rise to sinister implications that must be investigated.

We are, alas, saddled with an administration that doesn't really care about things like border integrity and national defense. This is why the Montana governor was incensed:

[Gov. Gianforte of Montana] said that in early briefings with the federal government, “they were contemplating taking it out of the sky. For whatever reason, they didn’t do that. Now, clearly, this went to the president’s desk. He was given options. For whatever reason, he chose not to act, and unfortunately, the result of that is that Americans are endangered and our enemies are emboldened.”

So if this is, in fact, a national-security threat, then Biden's lukewarm reaction could be seen as a presidential failure to perform the basic duty of acting as Commander-in-Chief and defending US sovereignty. It could also be seen as further evidence that Biden truly his, per his nickname, Beijing Biden—in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party and unwilling to offend China as a result. (Please remind me about all those false claims of Trump's Russian collusion, especially since we now have laptop evidence of Hunter Biden's dealmaking with China.) In the video below, Styx sees Biden's passivity as an impeachable offense:

But the religious-zealot left will still blindly vote for Biden should he run in 2024.