President Biden and his Praetorian Guard - as Ben Shapiro describes Joe’s platoon of obedient reporters - in the White House press room are going to have to do better.

Instead of cheering Joe’s swagger about how he on Wednesday “ordered” the military to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon that lazily floated above the continental United States for another three days, the media needs to demand that the president explain what took him so long. Demand the truth from this pathological liar. For once.

Sorry, but I’m not buying what Biden was trying to sell as he beat his chest Saturday after the balloon was finally shot down by an F-22 Raptor from Langley Air Force Base.

"I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible," Biden told reporters on Saturday. "They decided without doing any damage to people on the ground they decided that the best time to do that was when it got over water outside within a 12 mile limit."

"They successfully took it down and I want to compliment our aviators who did it and we'll have more to report on a little later."

Biden added, "I told them to shoot it down on Wednesday. They said to me let's wait for the safest place to do it."

It much more likely that Biden - the one person in the White House Situation Room who was too chicken to order the hit on Osama bin Laden - was also too afraid to shoot down the balloon until the drumbeat from the country TO DO SOMETHING shamed him into it.

Sen. Marco Rubio, interviewed by Jake Tapper on Sunday , shot down the claim by the White House that this situation had happened before, during the Trump administration.

“I think beyond just the ability to collect information, it is the ability to send a clear message, and that is that we have the ability to do this and America can’t do anything about it,” Rubio said. “If they’re not going to be able to stop a balloon from flying over U.S. airspace, how is America going to come to your aid if we invade Taiwan, take land from India, or Islands from the Philippines and Japan?”

“The Pentagon says they know of Chinese doing this four other times, previously once at the beginning of the Biden administration, three times during the Trump administration,” Tapper said. “You’re saying ‘no, that’s not true’?”

“No, what I’m saying – well the difference is this,” Rubio said. “Have we seen the Chinese fly these balloons in the past? Yes. I think there’s Twitter pictures of it flying at one point off the coast of the U.S. down south somewhere. The existence of the balloons is not a mystery to people in that field. What we’ve never seen, what is unprecedented and whoever the source is at the Department of Defense would have to acknowledge this, what is unprecedented is a balloon flight that entered over Idaho, over Montana, over all these sensitive military installations, Air Force bases, ICBM fields, right across the middle of the country, that has never happened before, that’s unprecedented.”

“That it flew briefly over some part of the continental U.S., that’s one thing,” Rubio continued. “But what we saw this week, this is unprecedented. This is no comparison anything that may have happened up to this point.”

It’s not just Rubio questioning the crazy excuse that this happened multiple times during the Trump administration. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and John Bolton, another former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump all deny that similar situations occurred during the last administration.

Does anyone honestly believe that if a Chinese spycraft was allowed to criss-cross the country during Trump’s time in office it would have remained a secret?

No way.

It would have been leaked and the House would have immediately commenced another round of impeachment hearings.

As soon as news broke that a Chinese spy balloon was hovering over Montana on Monday, some of us began asking the obvious questions.

It was an honest inquiry. If there was a reason we were afraid to kill the balloon, someone should now tell us what that was.

The lame excuse that they were worried people on the ground would be injured by falling debris stretches credulity when you realize the balloon spent an extended period of time over Montana, a state with a population density of 7 people per square mile.

Instead, the U.S. looked impotent, as it has so many times during this weak administration. More likely Biden was  paralyzed by fear and a complete absence of testosterone as the Chinese balloon floated laconically through our airspace.

God help Taiwan if they’re hoping for American action during a Chinese invasion.

Heck, we don’t even defend our own air space.