Principle..

 

President Biden on Tuesday night called President Xi Jinping of China a “dictator” who had been kept in the dark by his own government about the spy balloon that crossed into United States airspace this winter before being shot down by an American fighter jet.

At a campaign fund-raiser in California, Mr. Biden set off into what appeared to be an unplanned riff about the incident that ruptured relations with China for months, revealing what United States intelligence agencies had learned about the internal confusion in Beijing during the incident...

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
― Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle