Up, up and away

My not-so-beautiful balloon

NOW THAT the first balloon has been knocked out of the sky, the United States military has taken more.

Our first thought on all this: Good. The United States government—with the commander-in-chief as president— should protect American airspace. And not just for intelligence purposes (although that’s a mighty big concern). Some of these objects were said to be at the same height as our civilian airplanes, which is a safety concern.

Other thoughts on these stories:

■ The ChiComs, embarrassed by having their spy balloon spotted and dropped, now claim that the United States has flown high-altitude balloons over its airspace multiple times in the past year. Which sounds a lot like the “I know you are, but what am I?” playground argument.

Does anybody think that Red China would’ve just allowed the balloons to come and go? For goodness sakes, when an American “listening” airplane—in international skies—got too close to the mainland in early 2001, the ChiComs knocked it out of the sky. And for days there was tension between Red China and a new American president named George W. Bush.

Besides, winners have satellites.

■ Beijing won’t let it go, however, and sent out its Foreign Ministry spokesman to accuse the U.S. of doing what China has done: “The first thing the U.S. needs to do,” The Wall Street Journal reports him saying, “is change its ways and reflect on itself, and not to smear and incite confrontation.”

Except we have proof of their spying. The U.S. pulled it out of the drink east of South Carolina’s coast the other day. The ChiComs want us to take their word about American efforts.

Some word.

■ A bit of good news from Sen. Mitt Romney, who said this after a classified briefing: “There are a lot of things that are put up in the air by commercial interests, by governments, by agencies, by universities and so forth and we don’t track all of them, but we’re probably going to do a better job doing it in the future.”

■ The administration’s critics say the shoot-downs over the last few days was an “over-correction” to the criticism the Biden people got for allowing the first spy balloon to stay up so long. Gosh, damned if you do, etc.

Can you imagine the reaction if the administration didn’t take things more seriously now?

■ But not everything up there is looking at us. According to Time magazine:

“The most common objects likely to set off NORAD’s new, lower-threshold tripwire are weather balloons—and there are a lot of them out there. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates 92 weather balloon sites across North America and the Pacific Islands—69 of which are in the mainland U.S. and 13 of which are in Alaska. Each site launches an average of two balloons a day, one in the morning and one in the early evening.”

So there’s a lot of clutter, too. Which may only encourage enemies to send their own clutter, to mix with ours.

As long as these things aren’t manned, and if they continue to get into possible flight paths of commercial planes, they must be taken down.