I confess that I did not leave my house last week. I wasn’t about to take a chance that that Chinese Giant Balloon would attack me or, at the very least, monitor my trips to the grocery store. Why take that chance when I could remain safe within the confines of my home?
Even Pentagon assurances that China’s Giant Balloon posed no military threat did not provide any comfort to me. After all, the Pentagon could have been lying about the military capabilities of the Giant Balloon to prevent a nationwide panic. Moreover, keep in mind that this wasn’t just any Giant Balloon. It was a communist Giant Balloon!
As the Giant Balloon began heading eastward, I was sure it was headed to Virginia, where I live and, more important, where the CIA and the Pentagon are located! I just kept imagining massive cannons suddenly extruding out of the Giant Balloon and firing on me as I was driving to the grocery store.
Oh, I’m sure that there are many of you are scoffing over my concerns. It’s always easy to be courageous when a Giant Balloon isn’t headed in your direction. And I’ll bet most of you have never seen movies in which Americans are attacked by Big Scary Things, such as:
The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman
The Attack of the Giant Leeches
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
The Attack of the Giant Cheerleader
The press was reporting that China’s Giant Balloon was flying over Montana. Some reporters were disclosing that Montana is where the Pentagon’s nuclear silos are located. Are they supposed to do that? Surely, the Pentagon keeps the locations of its nuclear missiles secret, right? Has the mainstream press violated the Trading with the Enemy Act by telling the Reds where America’s nuclear missiles are? The people of Montana shouldn’t be too happy about that. If the Pentagon succeeds in ginning up a nuclear war with China before it succeeds in ginning one up with Russia, China is now likely to inundate Montana with nuclear missiles.
The Pentagon reported that the Giant Balloon also flew over Kansas. Kansas? Why Kansas? Hey, haven’t you noticed who is in the Super Bowl next Sunday? That would be the Kansas City Chiefs! I’ll bet those crafty Chinese Reds are trying to figure out which team to bet on.
The Pentagon announced that the Giant Balloon was also spying on several military bases. If so, there is an easy solution: just shut down the bases, which would obviate the need for the Chinese to send a Giant Balloon to spy on them. As I wrote last week in my article “Why Not Defund the Military?” the Pentagon’s empire of domestic military bases serves no useful function and should go the way of the dodo bird.
As China’s Giant Balloon was slowly making its way eastward, I couldn’t help but think about Francis Gary Powers. He was the CIA officer who was piloting the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union (i.e, Russia) in 1960.
What was Powers doing flying a CIA spy plane over Russia? Why, spying, of course. Illegally spying!
You mean, the United States was doing to Russia with its spy plane what China was supposedly doing to the United States with its Giant Balloon?
Yep. And I guarantee you that you’ll never guess what happened after Powers was shot down. CIA officials maintained with straight faces that their plane was a “weather plane” that had strayed off course. Isn’t that what Chinese officials are saying about their Giant Balloon?
What the CIA didn’t know was that Powers had disobeyed orders to take a cyanide capsule in the event of a shoot-down. Powers decided that he’d rather stay alive. So he was taken captive and told the Russians the truth about his spy mission. That’s how the Russians knew that the CIA was lying with its “weather plane” charade.
The CIA’s spy mission set back talks between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower. There has been speculation over the decades that the CIA intentionally sabotaged Powers’ spy plane to ensure that Khrushchev and Eisenhower would not reach an agreement that would bring an end to the national-security establishment’s lucrative Cold War racket.
Ironically, because of the Giant Balloon incident, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has suspended a planned trip to China. That might not disappoint Chinese officials, however, given that the primary purpose of Blinken’s trip was to castigate China for supposedly assisting Russia with its war in Ukraine.
In any event, the U.S. military finally decided to shoot down the Chinese Giant Balloon over the coast of South Carolina. They didn’t want to shoot down the balloon when it was over the continental United States because falling debris could hurt people. Apparently, they didn’t have the same concern for boaters off the American coast.
According to the media, the military used a Sidewinder missile to kill the Giant Balloon. The cost of that operation was around half-a-million dollars. Oh well, what’s another half-million dollars added onto the $31 trillion in debt that U.S. officials have already placed onto the backs of American taxpayers?
In any event, now that the Giant Balloon is gone, I’m feeling safe and I’m now going out of my house again. Oh wait! The mainstream press is reporting that another Chinese Giant Balloon is now flying over Latin America! OMG! The Reds are going to spy on Trump’s Berlin Wall along the border and then send their new Giant Balloon north to Virginia. I’m headed back indoors.