Constitutional Crisis

It seems like I've been ruminating over the past year about an ongoing unspoken constitutional crisis, for instance, here, the day after the June 27 debate debacle, where I compared the apparent coverup of Biden's decline to the final months of FDR's presidency:

Roosevelt could pass away at any time after the 1945 inaugural and have Truman succeed him, although had he passed away before that date, his successor would have been Henry Wallace. As it happened, the country got lucky. The problem right now is that if Joe Biden leaves the presidency for any reason before next January 20, his successor is Kamala Harris.

So right now, it looks as if congressional leadership got together and cobbled up a business-as-usual continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. They assumed that the congressional uniparty could be stampeded into passing it at the last minute to avvoid said shutdown, Biden as lame duck president would sign it, and the boodle would proceed uninterrupted.

The problem is that a complete outsider with no elected position, Elon Musk, who has apparently been camped out at Mar-a-Lago with the president-elect's ear, has thrown those comfortable assumpitons into confusion:

Yesterday, Trump ally Elon Musk banded with conservatives in the House and outside influencers to effectively tank a bipartisan government funding deal that included disaster aid and billions in farm assistance.

Yesterday, Trump ally Elon Musk banded with conservatives in the House and outside influencers to effectively tank a bipartisan government funding deal that included disaster aid and billions in farm assistance.

The complaint? That Uncle Sam was spending like a drunken sailor and needed to tighten the purse strings quickly.

But then Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance dumped gasoline on the fire. In a lengthy post on X, they criticized Johnson’s continuing resolution deal as “a betrayal of our country,” and demanded that Johnson raise the debt ceiling or eliminate it entirely.

Right now, neither Musk, Trump, nor Vance has any constitutional authority. Nevertheess, they can clearly act to prevent congress from passing a continuing resolution.

As these events unfolded, the two people with actual constitutional authority to negotiate a resolution to the problem, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, abruptly changed their holiday plans and decided to remain in Washington, although by all indications, neither has the mental capacity to make any serious progress:

Vice President Kamala Harris abruptly canceled her plans to travel to Los Angeles on Thursday evening, according to an announcement from her office.

. . . However, around midday, her office stated that she would "not travel to Los Angeles, CA, and will remain in Washington, D.C."

The news comes after reports that President Joe Biden had also arrived back at the White House after cancelling his upcoming holiday in Delaware.

Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment outside of normal working hours.

. . . It also remains unclear whether her decision to return to Washington D.C. was tied to the looming threat of a partial government shutdown as Congress struggles to reach an agreement on a funding bill.

But as long as Joe remains president, Kamala's role in any solution to the standoff would be purely advisory or as some sort of intermediary. Under such circumstances, given her record of incompetence, any such involvement on her part would be ineffective. (UPDATE: She's there purely as a potential tie-breaking vote in the Senate.) But this also comes in the context of belated recogniton that Joe has essentially been checked out for his entire term:

Two bombshell reports out this week, in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, depict a president thoroughly out to lunch for his entire term: Top cabinet members unable reach him. Staff regularly taking his place at official events. Biden refusing to hold morning meetings but clocking out at 4pm — even though he naps every day and, in July, announced that he'd no longer hold events after 8pm.

How many hours has Joe Biden actually spent working? How was the 25th amendment not invoked? Was the danger of a President Kamala Harris — who the liberal media also tried to sell as viable — truly that unthinkable?

So, why the need to have Kamala on hand in Washington now? Has Dr Jill decided it's time for Joe to duck out of this last crisis and dump it on Kamala to work out some kind of Hail-Mary deal? I wouldn't rule it out. But nobody's been using the words "constitutional crisis" all year, when we've clearly been in one.

More Drones!

The video above shows that at least some much-needed humor is coming into the public conversation about the New Jersey drones. It makes one point, although not necessarily the most important one, that politicians are exploiting the panic, and in fact stirring up more of it, in order to get support for new intrusive legislation that has nothing to do with any perceived problem. At 0:42:

Nobody knows where these things are from! I mean, it's all over the news!

You know how all through Covid and all the lies about Trump, you were telling me the news is nothing but propaganda?

Yeah.

And now you're believing the news?

More serious, and a little more to the point, is the video below from commentator and podcaster Bill Whittle. It starts with a reference I've already made, to the October 30, 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation of H G Wells's War of the Worlds, that is "infamous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was taking place". (There's a New Jersey connection there, too -- the breaking news style of the drama claimed to be observing the invasion in Grovers Mill, NJ, a real place near Princeton. The mill still exists but has been converted to condos,)

At 0:44, he says,

Part of what we're seeing with the drone story over New Jersey and other parts of the East Coast, part of it is mass hysteria, and the reason I can say that with some confidence is I've seen a number of pieces of video showing the drones over New Jersey, and they are without question regular airplanes.

I'm a professional pilot. The rules for the lighting markings on airplanes are clear. It's a green light on the right wing, red light on the left wing, white light on the tail, white light on the top, and I've seen any number of videos of the so-called drones that are clearly airplanes.

Occasionally it'll go in and out of focus, and then this point of light will turn into a glowing sphere which is also, you know, not a UFO, it's simply the thing out of focus. . .

This is exactly the wording that the spokespeople from the White House, DOD, FBI, CIA, FAA, etc etc have not been using for the past several weeks. Instead, they keep talking about "no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat" blah blah blah, but they never simply explain what nearly all of the sightings explicitly are, commercial airliners in normal landing patterns, mostly at Newark.

The discussion in the video goes on to ask, "Why do people see UFOs? Because they want to." As I've said, I'm a member of a Facebook group devoted to a New Jersey town where I lived as a kid, and now, instead of reminiscing about Mr Foley's antics in junior high school English class, they're posting about drones.

Here's what I saw over Main Street yesterday evening. [short video of plane at night showing landing and navigation lights]

Yes, I saw that too, about 5:30. Behind the grocery.

I just don't know what's going on. This is so disturbing.

A plane landing on runway 5 at Morristown (MMU). Get real.

What the heck is going on? Its getting so weird!

There are voices of sanity now and then, but everyone just ignores them and talks about how upset they are -- and the politicians and bureaucrats feed it. For instance,

Federal authorities are taking action against the mysterious drones seen flying over New Jersey and several other East Coast states.

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a ban on most drones over nearly two dozen towns, including cities from Camden to Bayonne, Edison, Harrison and Jersey City. The ban will be in effect until Jan. 17.

The FAA order says no unmanned aircraft can operate below 400 feet within one nautical mile of the airspace specified in each town.

Except that the "drones" the New Jerseyites are seeing are commercial jets, they aren't drones at all, they're flying at altitudes well over 400 feet, but because it's dark, people think they're much lower. The bottom line is going to be that they'll keep seeing "drones" over Main Street and won't know why the government doesn't shoot them down.

I've kinda got to go along with the first video above, the bureaucrats and politcians want to keep this going. Another queation for me, though, continues to be why the phenomenon continues to be limited to New Jersey. The sense I have from the Facebook posts I see is that the New Jerseyites feel they're ahead of the curve, in on something big; it makes them feel like they belong to a special group, that they're important.

Whither Pelosi?

My view has been that Nancy Pelosi ran the Democrat Party, which means that she also ran the country during the Obama and Biden administrations. Whether she can keep it up after her fall and hip replacement in Europe is a question -- and Trump may have views on that as well. However, it sounds as though she's unwilling to acknowledge the passage of time. According to the New York Post,

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was donning “very high” heels when she broke her hip in a nasty fall on marble steps at a World War II battlefield site in Luxembourg last Friday — then ostensibly powered through the pain to pose for a group photo.

. .. Pelosi is in her 19th term in the House of Representatives. Despite passing the leadership baton onto House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries over two years ago, she still has pronounced influence within the party.

The San Francisco Democrat is widely speculated to have played a key role in fomenting the pressure campaign against President Biden to drop out of the 2024 race. The two went months without speaking after the mutiny.

More recently, Pelosi reportedly whipped members against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) bid to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, having backed Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) for that role instead.

I've been saying here that she was behind Biden's selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate in 2020 -- it certainly wouldn't have happened without her approval -- and I think her plan all along was to conceal the extent of Biden's cognitive disability and replace him with Kamala, via the 25th Amendment if necessary, and preferably after the 2024 election.

Tim Walz was her choice for Kamala's running mate; it looks like Shapiro politely turned down the job in his interview, but had Kamala wanted him, Pelosi would have vetoed the choice. My surmise is that Pelosi also told Newsom, first, not to try to primary Biden, and then, after Joe dropped out, not even to think about replacing Kamala. Since Pelosi created both Kamala and Newsom, she could do this.

Her main problem is that things just didn't turn out as she expected, and factions within the party are beginning to turn against her. Trump's return appears to be a major factor in the political earthquakes happening in Canada, France, Germany, and potentially the UK, and his defeat of Kamala and by implication Pelosi in November won't be without continued impact here. It's hard to avoid thinking the photos of her expression at Kamala's concession speech were an indication of the impact Trumop's victory had on her.

My guess is that recovering from a broken hip at 84 is never easy, and Pelosi has had her last hurrah -- but then, so have her creatures Newsom and Harris. Adam Schiff will be the last to hang on, but by himself, he's as absurd a figure as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, and he can't survive for any length of time with Pelosi out of the picture.

"They Know Where It Came From And Where It Went, And For Some Reason, They Don't Want To Comment."

The FBI is coming closer to saying it, but it's still talking around the point:

The FBI on Monday delivered a warning to the public: don’t shoot guns or point lasers at mysterious drones in the sky.

Pilots of manned aircraft are increasingly being hit in the eyes with lasers because people on the ground think they see a drone, according to the FBI’s field office in Newark, New Jersey. The FBI is also concerned that people might shoot a gun at a manned aircraft after mistaking it for a drone.

Notice that the clumsily worded release mentions "manned aircraft", but it doesn't use a much clearer phrase, "commercial airliner", which is what the vast majority of these sightings are. Over the past few days, I've noted that the most-cited videos portray what Megyn Kelly breathlessly reported

are going from dusk to around 11:00 at night, they say. Look at this. Another eyewitness told the New York Times the drones show up one after the other following the same flight path!

Yes, that's what airliners do, they follow the same carefully designated flight path in single file as they prepare to land at busy airports, and the flight controllers line them up at the minimum safe distance as they arrive, one after the other.

I'm a member of a Facebook group dedicated to the New Jersey town where I spent most of my childhood -- I get to hear news of schoolmates and stories about the really great teachers -- and although these are generally smart and prosperous people, they're now posting their own photos of "drones" flying over at night. What astonishes me is that I knew, even as an 11-year-old kid, that the planes flying overhead were landing at Newark Airport, maybe 20 miles due east. I'd see them flying above from the hall window outside my bedroom as I got ready for school in the morning.

The photos that my former neighbors were posting were from the exact angle that I remembered from my window 65 years ago, they were just at night, not in the mornings. The posters were perplexed that the "drones" were displaying navigation lights. They marveled that they came in every 30 seconds or so, all following the same flight path. I tried to explain, but so far to no avail. This is getting out of hand. Here is the latest from our best and brightest in Washington:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and the Department of Defense (DOD) released a joint statement on Monday saying the drones currently seen over New Jersey pose no national security threat.

. . . The joint statement reiterated current evidence shows that the drone sightings include a “combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.”

More importantly, all four departments said the drones pose no national security or public safety risk while recognizing the concern that communities feel. Regarding drones that may have been seen over military facilities in New Jersey and other parts of the area, the statement said that such “sightings near or over DoD installations are not new.”

The most-cited videos, though, the ones on NewsNation and Megyn Kelly's podcast, are overwhelmingly from beneath airport arrival landing patterns. My former New Jersey neighbors are seeing these and are utterly puzzled. If someone at the FBI, DHS, DOD, or FAA would simply recognize this and explain this specific set of observations, it would go a long way toward calming things down.

Trump said cryptically at yesterday's press conkference, ""They know where it came from and where it went, and for some reason, they don't want to comment." Indeed, they know it came from O'Hare and went to Newark Freedom. Why won't they make this clear?

I would guess it's a combination. It's the holidays, they're all likely "working from home" anyhow, and a lot of them are also aware they're short-timers. Why put themselves out to write clearer releases? The pompous and viscous style also makes them seem important. As I quoted David Freiheit the other day, "They know damn well what it is, and it's not that they're not telling us because they're scared [of looking stupid], they don't give a flying F if they look stupid."

The supposed mystery, and the automatic implication that they know what it is and are covering something up, makes them feel important. Let's hope Trump can clean this up, or at least make a start.

Megyn Kelly Buys Into The Drone Frenzy

Back when Megyn Kelly was being eased out at Fox with a consolation book deal, having failed at her assignment to bring Trump down, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse began calling her MeAgain. It looks like those days are back.

At 1:20 in the video above, she embeds footage of a supposed New Jersey "drone", which is clearly a commercial jet. If nothing else, the roar of the engines gives it away. The Jerseyite comments,

It looks likea a [redacted] triangle. They look like a traiangle.

Er, that's because of the swept wings the jet's lights are mounted on. In a later sequence, another Jerseyite says,

It looks like a spaceship, right? Like, that doesn't look like a drone, right? . . . It's like a small plane, it really is! It's like a small plane. These are all drones in the sky.

Well, somebody better get on the case if all these drones are disguising themselves as planes! Megyn adds,

All these are going from dusk to around 11:00 at night, they say. Look at this. Another eyewitness told the New York Times the drones show up one after the other following the same flight path!

Well, that's what happens at busy airports, day or night. What if some enterprising observer tried to discover where the drones went after they saw them and found out they were carrrying humanoids, who disembarked? Hundreds of them! Maybe thousands? Are they zombies? Space aliens? What's going on?? MeAgain goes on,

They don't know where they take off from, or land. They do believe they're coming from the water, at least according to some of the officials. They say that they're not drones, they're not drones being flown by hobbyists, or related to DHS, this is what they're saying. . . State leaders told constituents they don't pose any threat to the public, no threat whatsoever. They don't know what the hell they are, but don't panic.

This is beyond comical. Even the people taking the videos think gee, they almost look likle planes, not drones, but because the media says they're drones, and the officials say they don't know what they are, they must be something else. Even the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal are furrowing their brows:

[N]o one in Washington seems to be able to convincingly explain the sightings. A joint statement Thursday by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security said: “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”

The statement added that “Historically, we have experienced cases of mistaken identity, where reported drones are, in fact, manned aircraft or facilities. We are supporting local law enforcement in New Jersey with numerous detection methods but have not corroborated any of the reported visual sightings with electronic detection. To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully.”

For whatever reason, nobody so far has come out and said, either at the White House, DHS, the FBI, or any responsible news organization, anthing like,

This doesn't explain every sighting, but let's try to eliminate all the reports we can explain, which will be 99.9% of them. This is what a commercial jet looks like from below as it's coming in to land at hight. [insert video] This is what a lineup of commercial jets ready to land in sequence at an airport looks like at night. [insert video] This is what a helicopter looks like at a distance at night. [insert video] If you have video or other evidence of drones that you think don't look or act like these commercial jets or helicopters, please send it to [e-mail address] at [DHS, FBI, CNN, whatever].

This is the piece that's been missing, the James Kallstrom crisis manager with the credibility to put things in perspective and focus attention where it belongs.

Insteead, as I've been saying, John Kirby at the White House has been typical of rthe bureaucrats who are issuing non-specific boilerplate claiming no threat to public safety but we don't know what they are. The fact is they absolutely do know what 99.9% of them are, and the only thing I can think is they're too lazy to explain it clearly, or their bosses are too timid to let them do it.

I almost think that sometime around the Orson Welles War of the Worlds panic, somebody drafted boilerplate that would cover a space invasion using words like no threat to public safety but we don't know what they are, filed it away, and made it known that this was what should be released in any such contingency. Any bureaucrat who deviated from that established policy risked their career.

The other problem is that the news organizations are exhausted (so they say) -- and that includes the Wall Street Journal, which could easily run a story showing that all the videos showing the "drones" are showing jets landing at La Guardia, and clear up the mess, but they won't, because it sells papers and generates clicks at the WSJ, CNN, NewsNation, and even MeAgain Kelly on YouTube.

MeAgsin has been trying to rehabilitate her reputation all year covering Trump's comeback on YouTube, but a stunt like this is going to set her back a long way, a shallow, self-absorbed, ditzy blonde.

The Drone Crisis Will End With A Whimper

I'm not sure if the New Jersey drone frenzy is starting to die down or not. It looks as though sightings aren't oing viral, they're still focused mostly on New Jersey and neighboring states, even though airliners in landing patterns and helicopters are common all over the US. A quick web search brings up just a few sightings in exurbs well east of Los Angeles, but none in LA City or County. I think there may be a good reason for this.

Our house is located on a low hillside overlooking Hollywood and Downtown, and in particular, if we look out the windows at night, we see helicopters, lots of them, all over the city. There are police, medical, traffic, news, and private helicopters, all the time. They are mostly far enough away that we don't hear them. Everyone in LA knows about helicopters and is used to them. Nobody is going to take them for drones, and it looks as though nobody is calling them in as drone sightings.

The video I've linked at the top of this post is the best explanation I've seen so far of the phenomenon. The vast majority of drone sightings are airliners and helicopters, others of the planet Venus, and a certain small number of actual, registered drones on various prosaic missions, plus another group of prankster kids and hobbyists. The main problem is that the administration has destroyed its credibility, doesn't understand its audience when it tries to reassure the public, and insults people when it seems to be calling them stupid or unsophisticated.

Here's Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, best known for claiming illegal immigration isn't a problem:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas downplayed the recent wave of drone sightings in the tri-state area and emphatically argued the feds can’t just “shoot” them down amid calls by some lawmakers to do just that.

Mayorkas, appearing on CNN Friday night, insisted many people are simply seeing drones that can be purchased at “convenience stores” and most instances are “cases of mistaken identity.”

The Homeland honcho told CNN host Wolf Blizter that his agency has seen no evidence of anomalous activity.

“We haven’t seen anything unusual,” Mayorkas said. “We know of no threat. We believe that there are cases of mistaken identity where “drones” are actually small aircraft — that people are misidentifying them,” he said.

He's saying this with his usual self-satisfied smirk, which does nothing but reinforce the view his audience already has that they're being gaslighted.

Between them, the Biden and incoming Trump administrations have a dilemma. Biden simply has no figure he can name at this point as a potential James Kallstrom surrogate -- nobody, for instance, from the FBI, which had at least some residual credibility at the time of TWA 800. Nobody from DHS, the CIA, or any other agency, they're all compromised in the public mind. Beyond that, all those guys are going to be out of work in another month, they're scrambling for new gigs, why put themselves out now for a lost cause?

A potential Trump move could be to designate one of his nominees -- maybe Kash Patel, maybe Tulsi Gabbard, maybe Pete Hegseth -- to serve as an interim drone ombudsman, maybe getting an asurance from Biden that he's told his agencies to give the Trump ombudsman full access and cooperation, to get to the bottom of the drone mystery and calm things down.

But we have the Napoleonic principle, "Never interfere with an enemy while he's in the process of destroying himself”. Trump can simply wait until Joe finishes driving a stake into his own heart, then come in on January 20 and make it clear he's fixing the problem, even if the problem is nonexistent. He also risks losing his own credibility if his own ombudsman isn't persuasive.

I think the likeliest outcome is that the drone frenzy will simply die out as no new revelations emerge to contradict the clumsy official narrative of nothing-to-see-here. On Thursday and Friday, there were initial reports of crashed drones that either resulted in fruitless searches or simply finding the remains of a hobby drone. An actual crashed drone the size of an SUV or a school bus would be the sort of thing that reinforces the story, but so far, it isn't happening.

There are also saner voices beginning to emerge on YouTube and social media that will reinforce a growing public perception that no new evidence is emerging. But it's probably not in Trump's interest to do anything that might have the effect of boosting the Biden administration's faded credibility in any way at this late stage.

Crisis Management 101

NEW: NewsNation reporter says his entire view of the New Jersey drones has changed after he witnessed 50 of them flying from the ocean.

The drones are reportedly the x 8-10 feet wide and can’t be detected because they don’t give off heat.

“I gotta be honest here. You know when this… pic.twitter.com/2tVGasw2bc

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 14, 2024

The X post above embeds footage from NewsNation reporter Rich McHugh. showing various drone sightings he and his cameraman captured in his neighborhood in Monmouth County, NJ. This is some of the most explicit video we've seen so far of this phenomenon. From his narration, he locates his position a few miles west of the naval ammunition depot at Earle, NJ, which is at Sandy Hook, and he says there's a body of water behind him, which would be Raritan Bay, which is also adjacent to Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens in New York City.

This suggests to me that he's standing near the west end of Raritan Bay, around maybe South Amboy in Monmouth County, and if the bay is behind him, he's looking south. He says he and his cameraman observed multiple drones coming into sight and disappearing over the course of many minutes watching, but all of them looked like the images on the video. A couple of posts down on the X thread, a visitor posts, embedding this image which seems to have gone missing from the post itself:

The first video clip of a “drone” is literally a commercial airplane. You can even see the outline of its shape. The wing tip lights are red and green as required. The area of northern New Jersey has so many airports, there’s a lot of air traffic there. pic.twitter.com/U762wOGRw5

— Ojisan Kaichou (@OjisanKaichou) December 14, 2024

In fact, here is the approach pattern for Newark Liberty Airport (click on the image for a larger view):

Based on McHugh's narration, he's probably standing almost exactly under, or maybe a little to the east of, the approach flight path of commercial airliners landing at Newark Liberty, and that's simply what he's seeing. They're a couple thousand feet above him, but because it's dark, he thinks they're much closer.

I don't want to claim every drone sighting is a commercial airliner or a helicopter, but if this is the best anyone can come up with so far, then I'm more inclined to think this is another version of the flying saucer fad of the 1950s. Sadly, as a New Jersey boy myself, it doesn't help at all that this got started in the Garden State.

Beyond that, I quoted John Kirby yesterday saying, "upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully." This is, in fact, probably correct. Why won't anyone listen?

In the first place, Kirby already has a poor track record for credibility. He came out in July, just before Joe dropped out of the race, and claimed that Joe was lucid, clear, direct, and in command, when it was plain that he wasn't.

Second, Kirby isn't terribly bright, and in that job, he's a short-timer. I get the feeling he took a poorly-worded explanation from someone at DHS or DOD and didn't do anything to clarify it. Why should he? Sounds like one or more of his bosses is already on holiday break and counting the days to January 20, and Kirby is mad he had to work that day himself. His lazy bumbling led to a confrontation yesterday with Fox's Martha MacCallum:

Martha MacCallum:
A lot of people were unhappy with that comment you made yesterday and felt like you were telling people they were nuts or that they didn’t know what they were seeing with their own eyes.

John Kirby:
No, not at all, Martha. That’s the farthest thing that I would ever do.

Wait a moment. Kirby is a professional press spokesperson, and he's just been accused of insulting his audience, which is what he in fact did, and he's in effect acknowledging it. He was just in government auto-zombie mode, and he's a little surprised that anyone would call him on it. Let's keep in mind that this is a guy who nevertheless comes off as sharper than Karine Jean-Pierre, but when KJP made it clear that Kirby was definitely still number two, he meekly agreed, in front of a national audience. Beta male all the way.

What Kirby needed to do, and what he either didn't want to do or wasn't able to do, was rewrite the insulting part of what he said and insert a paragraph or two of clear explanation, with maybe some audio-visual aid, of what a commercial airliner in landing approach looks like in the dark, with additional explanation of how many airport approach patterns are all over New Jersey, which is that kind of place. This would also be a good opportunity to explain why we shouldn't shoot those things down.

The problem is that Kirby isn't able to function at that level. Just because he seems smarter than KJP doesn't mean he's actually competent. What's almost comical here is that this is metastasizing into one last crisis for the Biden administration, which has never been able to follow the paradigmatic crisis management lessons James Kallstrom taught over the TWA 800 catastrophe: you need a single, credible point of contact who'll answer questions fully with a clear air of integrity.

This could turn into just a punchline of a New Jersey joke, but I'm a little worried there may be too much pressure on the wrong people actually to shoot one of those things down.