But when this claim was investigated further by the Wall Street Journal, Biden administration officials conceded that their predecessors would not have known about those earlier incursions. These were sophisticated operations, and U.S. analysts only became aware of them in retrospect. So, was that a failure of military intelligence? Why were Donald Trump and his national-security team not briefed on the matter? How vulnerable is American airspace to undetectable incursions right now?

To even ask these questions is to divert attention away from an even more pressing political conundrum: Why did the Biden administration and its allies seek political cover at all? If the balloon was a threat—a question that the fireball over the Carolina coast satisfyingly answered—why would the administration attempt to first ignore and downplay its existence only to pivot to blame-shifting partisan narratives when that doomed strategy failed? All this only saps the public of trust in the administration when it needs it most.

[We are also saddled with an unserious media that regurgitates political spin and reports it as fact. As Noah writes, this Biden administration spin was a non-sequitur. Even if it had happened before — and apparently it didn’t — that doesn’t negate the questions about their performance. If they could shoot the balloon down over the Atlantic, they could have shot it down over the Pacific or over Montana, too. A media industry interested in actual truth and accountability would have started on those points, not fallen back to them after their spin got exposed as false. — Ed]