Washington Post Moves "Beyond Objectivity" to Root for Chinese Spy Balloon

Sometimes the MSM's anti-Americanism is so enthusiastic they don't do their usual job of trying at least half-assedly to disguise it.

Paul told us yesterday about how the Left, through the Washington Post’s former Executive Editor, has decided that what remains of journalism should shed any residual pretense of objectivity and more-or-less openly embrace the Woke agenda so dear to the snowflakes now posing as “reporters.”

As if on cue, the WaPo today comes out with this only mildly disguised apologia for Chinese military spying in American airspace. There are some bad guys in the story, true. You won’t have a hard time guessing who they are: the Republican wahoos who think that indulging Chinese spying isn’t such a hot idea.

The Post’s headline is, “Why the Chinese spy balloon case isn’t as simple as ‘just shoot it down’,” and you know right there that you’re in for a con job. When the WaPo tells you that X “isn’t that simple,” you’re on alert that (1) X is probably a good deal more straightforward than you’re about to hear, and (2) doing X is in America’s interests and we can’t have that.

There is no question that China allegedly flying a spy balloon over the United States is provocative — especially on the eve of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first official diplomatic visit to Beijing (which has now been postponed).

Note the “allegedly” flying — which actually means that no sensate person in this town could doubt it. Note also that when the Post reports on whatever Donald Trump said last night, it’s never the “allegedly false claim of election fraud” and always “the false claim of election fraud.” But then Trump isn’t a Chinese spy balloon, at least not until we can bring back Bob Mueller’s creative team.

But amid the rapid calls from Republicans to simply shoot down the balloon, it’s worth running through some recent history, and the potential implications of such a move.

Never mentioned in the coming shake-and-jive is the fact that the first and most obvious implication is that this flagrant intrusion into American airspace will be brought to a stop.

Espionage generally has a long history among countries, going back even beyond America’s founding in 1619 on the slave trade.

Oh, wait, sorry, my bad, that’s the Post’s story on the next page. Got confused there for a moment.

Espionage generally exists in something of a gray area between countries. It’s largely tolerated, with the understanding that everyone does it. Taking aggressive action to prevent it could be met with a response — and potentially a disproportionate one — that you dislike even more. This is why countries only expel diplomats suspected of spying under extraordinary circumstances….

So the main thing to be worried about is not that the Chinese are openly spying in our airspace; the main thing to be worried about is that they won’t like it if we defend our airspace.

Well that’s cool!

Do you wonder why we should always worry about what our enemies might do but, in the Left’s telling, they should never worry about what we might do?

Pentagon budget documents last year detailed a new plan to increase U.S. funding for, yes, surveillance balloons. The idea was that we could track and combat hypersonic weapons developed by China and Russia. While such surveillance is often conducted by satellites, balloons are significantly cheaper.

You see the real problem here is that we had a plan for future funding of spy balloons. Yes, that might sound a bit strained, but only if you don’t understand how important it is to Blame America First.

The Pentagon’s stated reason for not shooting down the balloon yet is the danger it could pose to civilians on the ground. And it says it doubts the information being gleaned from the balloon would be more significant than what China is already obtaining via other means, such as satellites.

Look, people, they’re already spying on us, so what’s the big deal with a little more spying? You Americans are so fussy.

Now you might think that that kind of sentiment is something planted in the American press by the Chinese government, but you’d be wrong. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnut holes that it was planted by Biden’s State Department.

But they want to flesh it out:

“We had been looking at whether there was an option yesterday over some sparsely populated areas in Montana,” a senior defense official said. “But we just couldn’t buy down the risk enough to feel comfortable recommending shooting it down yesterday.”

The official added that “our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what [China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low Earth orbit.”

Again, this “look-it’s-really-OK” stuff wouldn’t be quite as galling, or quite as chilling, if it were coming from the Chinese propagandists rather than our own people.

As notably, the administration said that this isn’t an unprecedented event; there were similar instances during the Trump administration…“It has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this administration,” the official said.

Translation: But Trump did it too! Note that this time there’s no “allegedly.”

When I was eight years old, and got caught at something, I’d sometimes plead to my parents, “But Johnny does it too,” which was the one thing, along with lying, that was sure to get me sent to my room. And when I was eight years old, I didn’t have the responsibility of defending the United States.

But beyond that, officials must be considering what kind of precedent would be set by shooting it down, both for the United States and its adversaries. There could also be value in observing the balloon — and a downside to showing China and others how we would dispatch such a threat.

At this point, it’s hopelessly obvious that any excuse that can be made for Chinese aggression, will be made.

And then there’s the Post’s predictable finale’ — finding an airhead Republican to sing their song:

All of which was noted Friday by a rare Republican skeptic of the just-shoot-it-down strategy. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested that the balloon could be an attempt by China to “bait the United States into disputes over appropriate rights in the air.”

“Because we would say, ‘Look, we shoot thing down. It was over our airspace,’” Gaetz said. “Then does that give China some sort of pretext for China to take some action? … If you create this sort of jurisdictional pretext, you could see things escalate there very quickly.”

Gaetz added that if we knew the balloon was gathering very sensitive intelligence, we should shoot it down. But if it’s as insignificant as administration officials say, he warned against such a step.

This is the same Matt Gaetz the Post and the rest of the MSM have spent weeks lambasting as a right wing lunatic. But now he turns out to be Henry Kissinger.

It’s all worth considering, and worth putting in the context of the history of this kind of espionage — rather than jumping to conclusions about the appropriate course of action, to cast the Biden administration as soft on China.

Ahhhhh yes, “the context of history” and no “jumping to conclusions.”

If you think this story wasn’t ginned up and handed off to the Post by Biden’s State Department, there’s this bridge I want to sell you.

UPDATE: In a move whose fecklessness is hard to describe, we have now (Saturday afternoon EST) shot down the balloon over the ocean, after it was finished transmitting whatever data it got floating over the mainland, and when our legal right to shoot it down was more open to question than if the balloon were still over the US land mass.