Photo: Broadcast Media (Shutterstock)
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a helium-fueled nightmare here to steal all our national security secrets!
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Yes, the Chinese balloon scandal has eaten up a lot of bandwidth over the last few weeks. Other, arguably more important stories (like the Norfolk Southern mushroom cloud) haven’t gotten nearly as much media attention as the floating white blob that the government decided to shoot down earlier this month. News of the balloon’s intrusion into U.S. airspace sidelined what promised to be a productive diplomatic mission by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who “indefinitely postponed” his flight to Beijing after the balloon reared its head. Instead of de-escalation and diplomacy, America decided to completely and utterly lose its shit.
In addition to the military shooting down a bunch of other unidentified objects in recent weeks, America’s national security zealots have gone full-on gonzo about the dreaded balloon, with one Fox News guest recently suggesting that the balloon could’ve been carrying “anything” and that it was “extremely dangerous.” Blinken himself has called the balloon expedition an “irresponsible act and a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law.”
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Critics of America’s great national balloon freakout have pointed out that this really isn’t that big of a deal, that it’s not clear
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