ICYMI – China meant to send a message to America, tied to their recent balloon attacks. Antony Blinken doesn’t seem to be getting them but Florida Senator Marco Rubio is. He decoded it from his Senate Intelligence Committee perspective but there still might be a little more to the story. Now that we’ve established a precedent of shooting down their harmless “weather stations,” they might sink the next “harmless” U.S. battleship that dares to sail through the disputed Taiwan Strait.
China sending a message
On Sunday, February 12, conservative Florida Senator Marco Rubio declared that China can deny it all they want but “they sent a balloon into the U.S. to send a message about the country’s sway across the globe.”
It’s clear that Rubio paid attention in history class. He knows all about the trap a long-dead Greek named Thucydides warned us about. Rubio thinks Xi Jinping already fell into it and he’s dragging Joe Biden along into the next world war.
Referring to the first balloon launched by China, Rubio told ABC viewers that “the key part here is they knew exactly what they were doing and there was a message behind it.”
Absolutely correct by Marco Rubio.
Rubio says China sent balloon to send 'a message': They believe US is 'in decline' – ABC News https://t.co/TlzxYyeA3V
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) February 5, 2023
“They understood that it was going to be spotted, they knew the U.S. government would have to reveal it, that people were gonna see it over the sky.” Sputnik déjà vu, all over again.
The message China is trying to send, Rubio spells out in small words for ABC audiences to understand, “is what they believe internally.” Like that dead Greek, the Pooh Bear thinks “that the United States is a once-great superpower that’s hollowed out, it’s in decline.”
A prediction which has held in 12 of 16 cases says that war with a rising star power is “inevitable.” Xi wants to get it over with sooner, rather than later but Blinky doesn’t see it that way. He agrees there will be war but not until maybe 2028. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been prepping for 2025 and hoping the scramble alert sirens don’t go off sooner. Like any moment.
Delay cost us dearly
In diplomatic terms, the week long delay in shooting down the balloon which China teased us with cost Uncle Sam serious amounts of credibility. When spotted over Montana, Wednesday, the FAA issued “a ground stop for the Billings airport.” Nobody told the public until Thursday, “after it had already flown down from Alaska.”
Biden was afraid the wreckage would come down on one of the paintings Xi bought from Hunter, or an endangered squirrel or something, so hesitated to shoot it down. The jets finally got some unscheduled target practice but not until the spy balloon had drifted back out to see, mission accomplished.
“The message they’re trying to send the world is, look, these guys can’t even do anything about a balloon flying over U.S. airspace. How can you possibly count on them if something were to happen in the Indo-Pacific region?”
More alarming facts coming from that China Spy Flight DOD briefing. @RepAndyBiggsAZ tells Harris, “Pentagon was unable to jam transmissions of the #chinaballoon… we have a bigger hole in anti-surveillance technology than we would like to admit.” pic.twitter.com/owGGASuQP3
— The Faulkner Focus (@FaulknerFocus) February 10, 2023
Something like the sinking of a U.S. ship by China. The Pentagon, Rubio insists, doesn’t have a clue. “How are they going to come to the aid of Taiwan or stand with the Philippines or Japan or India when the Chinese move on their territory?”
Now that we switched tactics to shoot down two more balloons, we set a dangerous precedent. If Kevin McCarthy dares to fly into Taiwan, will China shoot down his plane? Who knows. Rubio has some heavy duty Gang of Eight hearings coming up this week. Classified ones “on the circumstances around the balloon.”
The first thing he wants to know is “what information the balloon was able to collect.” One thing we know since the craft has been recovered, former official Mike Mullen notes “It has propellers on it, if you will. So, this was not an accident. This was deliberate. It was intelligence.“
