There have been a lot of bad takes on the whole Chinese balloon issue, like the bad-faith insistence by Republicans that President Joe Biden should have had the balloon shot out of the air over land—this coming from the same Republicans who would, if debris had hit any person or property, insisted that Biden only had it shot down over land because he did not value the lives and property of whatever rural area was involved. Then you have Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, insisting that “We had plenty of capacity to scoop that balloon out of the air,” which he knows because “We used to do it all the time” with satellite film capsules, as if there is no difference between a small capsule attached to a parachute and a gigantic balloon that spread debris over seven square miles.
So many bad takes. And yet, despite all the competition, Politico Playbook has managed to distinguish itself.
RELATED STORY: Whoops: At least 3 Chinese balloons passed over US during Trump administration
Someone wrote this in all seriousness:
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“Swagger”? Are you kidding me with this, Politico Playbook?
If you wanted to deploy the term “swagger” in relation to a president’s State of the Union address—if you really wanted to do something that ridiculous and intelligence-insulting—you might just as easily decide that Biden giving the order to have the balloon taken down on Wednesday and then having the mental fortitude to wait until it could be done safely was a matter for swagger. You might decide that the mic drop of releasing information that Chinese balloons crossed over parts of the United States three times during the Trump administration, apparently undetected, was a matter for “swagger.”
But nooooo, Republicans have been out claiming the whole episode shows Biden’s weakness, so Politico’s view is that … it must at least have left Biden chastened. As if, in the absence of a Chinese balloon, Republicans would not have come up with some other thing to blow up into a scandal over the past week to try to set the stage for the State of the Union. It was always going to be something. And Politico Playbook was always going to treat that something as a serious concern for Biden.
“As of last night, House GOP leaders were still entertaining holding a vote before the speech chiding the administration’s response,” Playbook reports. What a surprise coming from the people who are hauling former Twitter executives in to explain why they didn’t allow nonconsensual intimate photos of Hunter Biden to be circulated by right-wing operatives in the weeks before the 2020 election. What a total shock coming from people outraged that the FBI hasn’t “raided” Biden’s house looking for classified documents after Biden allowed the FBI to search his house for classified documents.
The entire business of the United States House of Representatives under its current Republican leadership is to damage the Biden administration. Whatever was in the news over the past week, Republicans were somehow going to turn it into a pre-SOTU attack on Biden, and if nothing was in the news, they were going to dredge up old stuff or invent something out of thin air. But it’s the media that gives those attacks power. So, yeah, they’re going to do what they can with the Chinese balloon. And that’s what Playbook is doing—giving Republican attacks power, rather than putting them in context.
Listen to this episode of The Downballot for an in-depth analysis of the 2024 Arizona Senate race and the implications of Kyrsten Sinema's re-election decision. Special guest Victoria McGroary, the Executive Director of BOLD PAC, will also discuss the efforts to prevent losses among Hispanic voters and the fight against disinformation in Spanish language media.