Speaker 1: Well, we're really in the middle of a master class in propaganda from the American
right wing. The narrative continues to shift about this Chinese surveillance balloon which was popped
shot out of the sky on the orders of President Joe Biden, who will no doubt talk about the balloon at
tonight's State of the Union address, which, by the way, I will be covering live. And I hope that
you will join me for initially the narrative was Joe Biden is weak and he won't pop the balloon.
The narrative then became, well, Biden popped it, but any president would have pop the balloon. So
it's not really worthy of much praise. Now it is starting to become Why did Biden pop
the balloon? There were other better options from some esteemed military strategists. Such as. Newt
Gingrich. Yeah, Newt Gingrich weighing in on Fox News saying we could have scooped it. Why wasn't
it scooped? It was the wrong thing to pop it. Speaker 2: And only then, after it's all done,
bring it down and then bring it down in such a way that now they're having to go out and try
to find it in the ocean. I mean, we had plenty of capacity to to scoop that balloon out of the air.
We used to do it all the time with satellite photographs back before you had electronic
transmission. Right. We'd have planes who would go out and actually capture the core of the capsule
that had the the the satellite, the spy material. Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, of course, the sizes of
these things dramatically different. And, you know, I don't know what sort of super duper
pooper scooper Newt Gingrich has in mind here, but I wasn't able to find anything
about scoopers for scooping stuff up as big as three busses at 66,000 feet, I believe it was,
or whatever the case may be. Now, does does it mean that that doesn't exist? Well,
I don't know. Newt Gingrich is someone who has been out of any position of power for a
very long time. And there is no question that Joe Biden was given all of the options. Newt Gingrich
certainly doesn't even know what they are. Now, one other thing. I don't know why no one
is proposing what really should have been done. Send astronaut George Anthony Katara, Dave there,
Santos up to grab the thing himself. That really would have been the solution, obviously. Listen,
Newt Gingrich specifically is sort of like a joke. He's kind of like the punchline to whatever joke
makes sense at this point in time. He's the guy who said that under his. If you were to call it
leadership by 2021, we would have had a permanent colony on the moon. So not really a serious guy,
but this is really all about propaganda and it's all about narrative. And it's about this idea
that you can't allow any Democratic president if you're a Republican, to get anything right,
anything, anything right at even the smallest level. Joe Biden can do no right. And as I've
told you before, I am on the left. I believe that progressive policies are better for the country.
I believe modern Republicanism is an absolute disaster. But when Trump got something right,
I would tell you whether it was a couple of the tweaks to the tax code in 2017 that did make sense
or elements of the First Step Act or the reality that Trump really didn't deserve blame for rising
inflation and gas prices at the end of it. Let's call things what they are, and this is relatively
uncontroversial. Joe Biden doing what? At the end of the day, military advisors put it to him,
which are also the same limitations that Donald Trump would have had. So the news story is why
shoot it down? We could have Pooper scooped it and then brought it down or whatever the case may be.