Chinese Balloon Hovers Over Biden’s 2023 State of the Union

by Roger L. Simon

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.

Not that the Chinese leadership is immune to it. Communism is the best system yet to be devised for separating the haves from the have-nots and keeping it that way. They’re greedy and they recognized ours easily, taking almost endless advantage of it.

So it’s now urgent that the first question gets answered as quickly as possible, also its corollary: Who is really responsible for our atrocious foreign policy and our bumbling, embarrassing “woke” military of Afghanistan fame (that incidentally left an intact Bagram Air Base roughly 100 miles from the center of Chinese nuclear research)?

Is it Biden himself, or is it, possibly, the man who said quite openly he preferred to rule from the basement? Or is it some form of collective sabotage of our country by our so-called “elites”?

Regarding the latter, some are suggesting the Chinese sent the balloon at this time as a display of power and to embarrass Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who was scheduled for secret talks with their leader Xi Jinping that have now been canceled.

Meanwhile, John Kerry—our “special presidential envoy for climate”—has been in Beijing to discuss the “global warming crisis” with the Chinese communist leadership. He allegedly has been downplaying the regime’s human rights abuses in his hunger to make a deal, as he has previously done with the Iranians to get a nuclear deal while the mullahs’ goons beat up freedom demonstrators in the streets.

I remember the day the Democrats were all about human rights. What happened?

“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”—H.L. Mencken.

Just ask Joe Biden.

Go for it, Sarah. You have the floor.

First published in the Epoch Times.