The Patriot Post® · Biden Bungles ChiCom Threat

One of the hazards of prosperity is complacency, and it’s hard to deny that we’ve become complacent. After all, only a people corrupted by complacency could cast, ahem, 81 million votes for a cognitively addled man like Joe Biden.

Consider the original Chinese spy balloon, which our commander-in-chief allowed to traverse the United States on a course that took it past our ICBM siloes, our strategic bomber command, our Oak Ridge nuclear facilities, and our Mid-Atlantic naval bases before finally shooting it down over the Atlantic.

“Not a major breach.” That’s how our commander-in-chief dismissed the spy balloon sent by our nation’s foremost geopolitical foe. Then, in a fit of inferiority, he launched a pathetic and ever-changing “Trump Too” attack.

Further, in a State of the Union speech that lasted an hour and 12 minutes, Joe Biden spent just over a minute talking about China generally, and about 10 seconds talking about its spy balloon almost specifically. “But make no mistake about it,” Biden said. “As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.”

Sure enough, we did act. After the guided spy balloon had completed its mission. (And if the ChiComs were able to continue guiding it remotely even after we became aware of it, how can we have any confidence in the Biden administration’s claim that we thwarted its intelligence-gathering transmissions?)

Why on earth isn’t anyone calling that willful failure to protect our vital national security interests an impeachable offense? If the Democrats can impeach a Republican president for telling the leader of a notoriously corrupt foreign government to clean up his country’s act, surely the Republicans can impeach a Democrat president for being asleep at the switch as commander-in-chief.

What were the Chinese up to with that weird device, and why aren’t we talking about it? We know about the strategic course it cut across our most sensitive military sites, but perhaps the Chinese were probing our susceptibility to an EMP attack. Imagine an electromagnetic pulse that could knock out our nation’s dangerously soft power grids. As Texas state senator Bob Hall warns in a Washington Examiner op-ed, “Not only would our grids be down, but all modern automobiles, telephones, communication equipment, computers, refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters, internet, and computers would be destroyed.”

The first to die, Hall correctly notes, would be those dependent on electricity for oxygen, kidney dialysis, or other life-sustaining health equipment. Then those who depend on prescription drugs would begin to die as the supply chain crumbled.

The worst of it, of course, would be our deprivation from social media. Imagine if our kids weren’t able to watch the latest hilarious videos on TikTok.

The ChiComs’ Red Zeppelin has since been followed by three more incursions in recent days — incursions about which, so far, we know maddeningly little.

In a piece titled “What’s Going On Up There, Mr. President?” the Wall Street Journal editorial board asks: “Are we seeing these objects now only because we are suddenly looking for them? Are they sent by foreign actors, or someone else? Do they pose a threat, and we don’t mean only to civilian air traffic? What the hell is going on up there, Mr. President?”

Indeed, what the hell?

Weakness is provocative. But failure to take serious things seriously is just plain dangerous.