Letter to the Editor: Examining 'Balloon Gate'

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Americans watched with increasing consternation as a confirmed Chinese spy balloon passed over the entire continental United States gathering intelligence information on our strategic defenses, infrastructure and national security response or lack of it for a week. 

The Biden administration came out with one conflicting explanation after another as to how long they were aware of it, why they had not shot it down before it reached America, and why it was no big deal. 

The biggest whopper was why they had not shot it down, saying it was because it might fall on somebody or something on the ground. This was after it traveled across the Gulf of Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas and the great plains where the population is marginal at best. 

After they finally got up enough courage to shoot it down, Biden's unnamed lackeys told us it was no big deal because it had happened at least three times during the Trump administration, although it was “undetected” until two years after he left office.

Some significant questions of my own arise from this public exercise in “Charlie Foxtrot,” a term we used in the military to describe a situation that is completely and totally a mess. How did this happen? Why was it not shot down over the Pacific Ocean? What top secret sites did it collect information and transmit data to the communist Chinese on? Why did it take a week to act? What kind of data was this balloon designed to collect? Air currents to chart the dispersal pattern to potentially deploy a biological or chemical agent on Americans? Did this same thing actually happen under Trump or is this just another in a long line of obvious mistruths to diffuse blame and incompetence? Why has nobody been fired?



At some point, you must suspend the benefit of the doubt concerning everything and anything that comes out of the Biden administration’s collective Charlie Foxtrot administration. Things like “the border is secure after three million-plus non-citizens have forcefully sought asylum.” Or insinuations that 150,000 Americans have not overdosed on fentanyl in two years, or that inflation and gas prices did not reach some of their highest levels in American history last year. Or claims the Afghanistan retreat was a textbook success, COVID-19 did not originate in a Chinese communist lab and the biological definition of men and women is unknown. 

I say, Charlie Foxtrot folks. Elections indeed have consequences.

Mitchel Townsend

Silver Creek