Joe Biden continues to think he can get away with anything, as long as he claims to be better than Donald Trump. Now he’s trying it with national security.
Is a Chinese balloon floating over the continental United States from end to end an embarrassment?
Sure — but, but, but, say anonymous administration officials, Trump had a balloon too. Many balloons!
No one saw those Trump-era spy balloons, and US officials knew nothing about them. But Biden’s unnamed officials learned all about them after Trump was out of office.
How? When?
Biden doesn’t feel the need to say, even as the story of the surveillance device that he let drift across the country soars to the top of the week’s headlines.
The administration has given Congress some information on earlier Chinese balloons encroaching near the coasts of Florida and Texas. But what are the precedents for such a well-identified floating object getting all the way from Alaska to South Carolina?
The president really wanted to shoot it down sooner, we’re told, but the Pentagon held Fightin’ Joe back. If it were up to him, China’s eye in the sky would have been shut for good the moment we detected it. But hey, Biden is only the president . . .The administration’s blame-shifting is as embarrassing as the free-roaming spy balloon itself. And to leak stories about purported Trump-era incursions is a shameful abuse of authority.
If these earlier incidents, and the story of how they were found out, are really so sensitive, Biden officials should not be tantalizing the press with these tales just to make the boss look better.
Whatever happened to loose lips sink ships?
Or if these other pokes and prods at our nation’s privacy and security are worthy of public record, we need to hear more about them.
Where did they take place? If there’s good reason to keep secret exactly how the incursions were discovered after the fact, the public is still owed a basic explanation — one that speaks to the national interest and not Joe Biden’s.
This assumes, of course, these retrospective incidents really happened.
Does our government actually know that they did, or is this speculation on the part of officials who can’t be held to public or professional account because of their anonymity?
This wouldn’t be the first time someone with a security clearance and a journalist’s phone number inflated a story in order to embarrass Trump or exculpate Biden.
We’re in year three of Joe Biden’s term as president. He has no excuse for still defining himself as not-the-other-guy or for letting nameless flunkies do it for him.
When Communists sent spycraft over our heads during the Cold War, presidents didn’t pretend that decisions about how to deal with them led anywhere but to the Oval Office.
And Dwight Eisenhower didn’t try the “him too” defense to implicate Harry Truman in the many challenges of his administration — and not just because Sputnik was more revolutionary than a balloon.
The difference then was that America had presidents, whether good or bad. Joe Biden holds office, but at times like these he’s not the president, he’s just not the other guy.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
