Events of the past few weeks have pretty much summed up the real state of our union.
The “State of the Union” address by President Joe Biden on Feb. 7, was the second-least watched address in the last 30 years, according to a Feb. 9 Washington Examiner article, and even liberal FactCheck.org noted that the speech “included claims that didn’t tell the full story.”
Perhaps the thing that stings Democrats the most is that the largest number of people who suffered through the speech did so by watching it on Fox News, at 4.7 million viewers. Ouch!
You can bet that Eagles fans will still be whining about “being robbed” in Super Bowl LVII long after Biden is written off as a sorry chapter in American history, but something else is occurring that should drive both Biden’s sorry speech and Philadelphia’s flop out of the headlines, and that is the feckless manner in which the administration is dealing with incursions of potentially hostile objects into our sovereign airspace, something barely mentioned in Biden’s speech.
Of course, the whole idea of national sovereignty under the Biden Administration has become a quaint notion, with our southern border crisis. In fact, the only reaction to the flood from Democrats occurs when those same undocumented immigrants show up in Democrat-controlled enclaves such as Martha’s Vineyard or New York City, where the term “sanctuary city” is used only for virtue signaling.
The incursion of the Chinese surveillance balloon, which just happened to float over some highly sensitive U.S. defense installations such as Malmstrom Air Force Base, was known to Defense officials days before it made the headlines, and even before it intruded over U.S. airspace on Jan. 28.
According to a Feb. 8 CNN article, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported on Jan. 27 that a foreign object was headed for U.S. airspace, but the report was largely ignored, and although aircraft were dispatched to observe the object when it crossed into U.S. airspace on Jan. 28, the Department of Defense didn’t bother to brief the president until three days later and no one else knew about it until Feb. 1, when the balloon itself was spotted and reported to the media, leaving the administration scrambling for answers.
Of course, we all know now that Biden allowed the DOD to wait until the balloon had flown all the way across the country before shooting it down, in fear that the crash debris might hit some poor cow in Montana.
Since the original balloon incident, Biden and his “woke” Department of Defense are in a purely reactive mode, shooting down three more “objects” over Alaska, Lake Huron and the Yukon, a region in a country described by White House Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre as “Canadia.”
We still don’t know what the last three objects were, other than they were about the size of a “small car” and one was cylindrical, and one was octagonal. It’s worth noting that there have been transmitter-carrying balloons sent up by amateur radio operators in the recent past that have circled the globe numerous times at 40,000 feet.
These balloons require no permits, and reportedly, they are still up there. See for yourself at http://ham-tv.com/balloon/. Of course, the Defense Department won’t specify that the last three objects were balloons, and we might never know for sure.
The shoot-down of the Chinese balloon and the other three “objects” were the first time since the establishment of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, in 1958 that the United States has had to take hostile action against any foreign object entering our airspace, and that is significant, because in the 65-year existence of NORAD, no nation has risked trying to intrude upon our sovereign territory until now.
The most likely explanation of that fact is that the current civilian and military leadership of the United States isn’t taken seriously by either our foreign friends or adversaries, and potential bad actors feel that there will be no consequences for their actions.
This should set off alarm bells for any thinking American, but one wonders just how many thinking Americans still exist in a nation that elected the likes of Joe Biden as president.
Dwight Weidman is a resident of Greene Township and is a graduate of Shepherd University. He is retired from the United States Department of Defense, where his career included assignments In Europe, Asia, and Central America. He has been in leadership roles for the Republican Party in two states, most recently serving two terms as Chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party. Involved in web publishing since 1996, he is the publisher of The Franklin County Journal. He has been an Amateur Radio Operator since 1988, getting his first license in Germany, and is a past volunteer with both Navy and Army MARS, Military Auxiliary Radio Service, and is also an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
