None of these sources were willing to be publicly identified, but they were said to fall along the MGT—Matt Gaetz—Tucker Carlson wing of the party.
“Biden couldn’t risk downing the balloon over dry land and having the pulverized pieces of Hunter’s latest laptop put together by the New York Post,” hissed the Gateway Pundit.
To even hear even regular Republicans talk about it, he might as well have sent the spycraft a bouquet when he ordered a missile through its envelope.
Brave Tom Cotton said to FOX, “What began as a spy balloon has become a trial balloon testing President Biden’s strength and resolve, and unfortunately, the president failed that test. Of course, if he had downed it over Arkansas and crushed so much as a single meth lab, I’d be singing an entirely different tune.”
“This is all about China testing the American resolve,” Chris Sununu, who is coincidentally sometimes referred to as the New Hampshire Gasbag, said on "This Week" on ABC. “They know that tensions are escalating, and they want to see what kind of leadership we have. The president clearly failed on this one,” he added. “I just wish it could have been downed over my state. My constituents don’t mind being covered in radioactive soft noodles for the sake of national security.”
But, let’s face it--if Joe had climbed into a fighter jet himself, Independence Day style, and shot the spy balloon out of the sky fearlessly while it tried to slather him in death rays, Republicans would not be happy about his actions. They are annoyed because he followed expert advice (the Pentagon’s). This is not the Republican way, as exemplified by their treatment of the Center for Disease Control during the pandemic. The advice of people who think about certain problems and how to solve them full-time is to be cast aside in favor of the opinions of reality TV stars and country-western singers when it comes to a national crisis. People standing in their yards and emptying their AR-15’s uselessly at the sky are the real Americans, not our woke military and its billions of dollars’ worth of air-to-air-missiles, of which exactly one was used to pluck the spy balloon out of the heavens.
Apparently, Biden wanted to pop that sucker right away, but was counseled not to shoot it down over land, even when it was over Montana, where it would only possibly have killed a few a few sheep and survivalists when it fell. Or so he says. The haunting possibility that the President dunked the balloon deliberately in the drink in a calculated attempt to cover up the crimes, and possibly more naked pics, of himself and his kid renders this accomplished act of American self-defense in a sordid light.
The Republicans, ever paragons of forthrightness, would have shot it down over Atlanta, just for the sake of suppressing the black vote, I suspect, along with preserving the proof of Biden chicanery that the Chinese were so helpfully trying to ship them.
But we’ll never know for sure, now that the hard drive full of Biden crimes is melting hopelessly into the dead sargasso off the Carolina coast.
Next time, Xi, just use DoorDash.