ROGER SIMON: Chinese Balloon Hovers Over Biden’s 2023 State of the Union.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who is delivering the Republican response to President Joe Biden after his State of the Union address on Feb. 7, should open with the following question that is more imperative than ever.
What does China have on Joe Biden?
More than ever, America has a right to know.
When I started to write this, a Chinese spy balloon with a mysterious payload the size of three buses, we are told, was hovering over South Carolina. It was finally shot down over the Atlantic by our military, minutes after I finished my initial draft.
Our government knew about the balloon for a week and did nothing, hiding the presence of the balloon from the public, only to have it discovered by a local newspaper in Billings, Montana, that ran a picture.
The administration’s excuse for not shooting it down was that the payload might injure people, but for a good part of that week, the balloon was traveling over remote areas in Alaska, making that assertion ridiculous. It would have been safe even over Montana, where there are about seven people per square mile.
So I repeat: What does China have on Joe Biden?
Our president’s relations with the communist country have been a question for some time, even before he started officially running for the office of president.
Who can forget that he said the following in May 2019 about the regime that practices genocide on Uyghurs, Falun Gong, and just about anybody who raises his or her hand in defense of democracy:
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”
Not bad folks? Evidently, he missed the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Nevertheless, Biden walked the foregoing back pretty quickly for obvious reasons, but I suspect he was then actually speaking from the heart—or the pocketbook, considering the amount of money his family—not to mention the University of Pennsylvania, home to the Penn Biden Center—have received from the People’s Republic.
Add it all up and it pushes or even exceeds a hundred million for Biden-related payments alone. Nobody knows exactly yet. Investigations are in progress and should now be redoubled.
The word for all this is “elite capture,” which the Chinese Communist Party has been practicing for decades, literally buying a fair percentage of our best universities, scientific institutes, corporations, entertainment, and more that we don’t know about or realize.
They exploited a weakness in the American character that Alexis de Tocqueville highlighted in his “Democracy in America” back in the early 19th country: greed. It’s not our best trait.
Roger says he’s emailed a copy to Sanders. We’ll see if she runs with it.