Uncle Sam went ballistic over a balloon?

It doesn't take an Einstein to realize that with the multi-billion-dollar "Star Wars" type of Space "defense" radar and satellite technology, the US government had to have spotted the gigantic rubber ball hundreds--if not thousands--of miles before it reached any US border. It certainly would have ample time to contact Chinese authorities to ascertain the nature of that potential intrusion.

Instead, Washington chose to let the intrusion proceed for days and using it as an opportunistic propaganda tour de force, making the improbable case that the Chinese would choose such a low-tech method to spy on US military "secrets." In actual fact, even the Pentagon openly admitted that there was no chance an sensitive could have been obtained by such amateurish tricks...

More likely, war hawks in the Biden administration intended to make a mountain out of a molehill, weaponizing a minor incident into a hyperbolized "reverse U-2 Incident," and using the balloon overflight to demonize China and even exercising a diplomatic slap-down with the postponed Sec'y of State Blinken's upcoming visit to Beijing.

Maybe not so incidentally, the actual shootdown might have been a face-saving way to prevent the world from discovering whether it was just n errant weather balloon, as Beijing insisted from the outset. Apparently, this is another classic case of Imperial petulance at its lowest trajectory.