Joe Biden did ‘right thing’ shooting down UFO with missile

WASHINGTON — White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Friday that the US government may never fully determine whether President Biden launched a $439,000 missile to pop a $12 balloon near Alaska — but insisted that it was “exactly the right thing to do” either way.

Kirby faced the press one day after the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade said its silver party-style balloon may have been one of three unidentified objects that Biden ordered shot down this past weekend.

“We all have to accept the possibility that we may not be able to recover” debris from the objects, Kirby said before asking reporters to put themselves in Biden’s position.

“I’d ask you to just for a second to put yourself in his shoes, certainly in light of the Chinese spy balloon and what was a very real, certainly very sizable and tangible security threat — surveillance threat — to the United States,” he begged.

“In the wake of that … the military fine-tunes their radar parameters to see more and of course they’re finding more. And you got these three, and they’re unidentified, they’re not responding to any kind of communication, so we don’t know who owns them or what their purpose is,” Kirby went on. “They’re also at altitudes that could effect the safety of civilian air traffic, and based on the flight path and prevailing winds, potentially moving over sensitive military sites.”

Kirby stressed that Biden ordered the unprecedented military actions in North American airspace “because he takes so seriously his responsibilities to protect this country” — fending off suggestions the president overreacted to political criticism of his handling of the Chinese spy balloon that crossed the US before Biden had it shot down Feb. 4 off South Carolina’s coast.

“Given the situation we were in, the information available, the recommendation of our military commanders, it was exactly the right thing to do at exactly the right time,” Kirby told NPR reporter Scott Detrow.

Detrow pressed Kirby, asking if the Biden administration had “any feeling of frustration of perhaps this was a $12 hobby balloon from a group of kids in Illinois.”

“Again, given the information that we had at the time, and legitimate concerns about potential surveillance in the wake of the Chinese balloon, you make decisions based on the best information that you have,” Kirby said.

The spokesman then asked: “Wouldn’t that be a better outcome, if it turns out that they were in fact civilian or recreational use or for weather use and therefore benign as the intelligence community thinks? Isn’t that a better outcome than to have to think about the possibility of greater threats to our national security?”

Later in the briefing, Newsmax reporter James Rosen pressed Kirby on whether the episode reflects poorly on Biden’s judgment — alluding to the fact that the trio of shoot-downs required the use of four Sidewinder missiles that cost on average $439,000.

“You have tried to portray this entire sequence of events as one in which the commander-in-chief demonstrated good judgment at the right time and did the right things,” Rosen began.

“The president’s critics obviously see it differently,” Rosen went on. “And what they depict is a commander-in-chief who … was able to track this Chinese balloon from the inception of its mission off of Hainan Island all the way to US airspace and across the country. And eventually that was shot down after the Chinese had had a good look at whatever they wanted to see with that balloon, and who then presided over a series of missions in which millions and millions of dollars were spent and missiles were fired at objects that you now concede most likely were benign in nature.”

Rosen added, “That suggests the commander-in-chief who overreacted after allowing the Chinese spy balloon to do what it did and then went trigger-happy on a bunch of kites and balloons that had no military threat to them. What do you say to that depiction of events?”

Kirby replied that “no Americans in the air or on the ground were hurt… [and] no significant surveillance [was] achieved by the Chinese by balloon … No apologies here.”

Rosen interjected: “Knowing everything he knows now, would he take the exact same steps and shoot off these expensive missiles at these benign objects?”

Kirby said “we are going to put some more policy parameters in place,” but that “you make the best decisions you can with the information you have and the recommendation of military leaders.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday denied that Biden was “embarrassed” by his actions. The 80-year-old president didn’t publicly address his decisions for nearly six days before giving a seven-minute speech about the incidents without any significant Q&A.