Balloon Daze

Marion Foley was out cross country skiing in her Martin City pasture lot the other evening when she looked up in the sky and saw something glowing.

At first she wasn’t sure what it was. But then she realized — it was a balloon.

It wasn’t just any balloon, of course. It was the balloon, she would later learn. The Chinese balloon.

The one spying on us — you and me and everyone else in the U.S. and even part of Canada until it was eventually shot down by an F-22 fighter jet 60,000 or so feet over the Atlantic Ocean, long after those nasty Chinese were able to steal my Social Security number.

I, of course, blame Joe Biden for all of this.

We knew the balloon was coming and we could have easily shot it down over Marion’s pasture and I wish we had, because if you read last week’s newspaper, aside from a developer telling lies, it was a pretty slow news week.

But back to the balloon. It was a big deal.

“Do we have a plan on what we’re going to do next time this happens? … I will tell you this: we think we know what they were going to collect, but we don’t know. That scares the hell out of me… Quite frankly I’ll just tell you, I don’t want a damn balloon going across the United States when we potentially could have taken it down over the Aleutian Islands… I’ve got a problem with a Chinese balloon flying over my state, much less the rest of the country,” Montana Sen. Jon Tester said during a public briefing of Defense Department officials last week.

Sen. Steve Daines didn’t think much of balloon incident, either.

“Unfortunately I left the administration’s briefing with more questions than when I went in. It is completely unacceptable and infuriating that the Chinese spy balloon was allowed to hover over Montana and our missile bases to begin with and was then allowed to travel across the entire United States before it was brought down. Montanans deserve more answers,” he said.

Nevermind hovering over Foley’s pasture, gathering information on cows and horses vital to the defense of the U. S. of A.

The Defense Department said it wanted to shoot the balloon down over water so it could recover it.

OK, fine, but you shot it down with a Sidewinder missile. Wouldn’t a bullet or two have done the trick?

The Chinese, of course, said they were just checking out the weather. Maybe that’s true. I mean, with all the high-falutin missiles and planes and satellites the Chinese could have thrown our way, why would they send … a ballon?

And someone else made a point that we do quite a bit of spying on China ourselves, and we don’t want them shooting at all of our fancy spy, er, weather balloons, planes and satellites either.

Since then, of course, there’s been even more stuff found floating over the U.S. and Canada.

The military, this time around, promptly shot it all down.

See how easy that was?