« Can Heidi Ganahl fix Colorado? | To the Church: Join, or die »
October 20, 2022

Joe Biden gaslights over soaring energy prices

By Monica Showalter

Joe Biden always manages to disgust, and yesterday's thrashing performance on energy prices was no exception.

According to Fox News:

President Biden dismissed Wednesday accusations that he was releasing oil from the nation's strategic reserves in order to boost Democrats ahead of the midterm elections.

Speaking at the White House, Biden explained that the White House would be releasing an additional 15 million barrels from the U.S. reserves. He went on to say that he would refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when prices fell below $70 per barrel.

Asked by a reporter to respond to Republican accusations that the release of the oil reserves was done for a political advantage, Biden dismissed the notion.

"It's not politically motivated at all," Biden said. "It's motivated to make sure that I continue to push on what I've been pushing on, and that is making sure there's enough oil that's being pumped by the companies so that we have the ability to be able to produce enough gas that we need here at home, oil we need here at home and at the same time keep moving in a direction of providing for alternative energy."

He thinks we're stupid.

He claimed that his release of the strategic petroleum reserves was nothing political because Putin did it.  What a handy guy.

Putin's war in Ukraine drove up oil prices, and Biden insisted that he tamped them back down by releasing the reserves.  "International events," he intoned, while carefully avoiding mention of the slap in the face he got from Saudi Arabia when he begged the Saudis to pump oil from him, or the clown show he's got going with non-functional, dilapidated Venezuela, which couldn't pump oil from the ground if it tried.  "War is raging," he claimed, even though the U.S. is not at war with Russia right now.  Meanwhile, Russia's making plenty of money on its oil and finding plenty of buyers outside the Western orbit with its sanctions.  While war can drive up energy prices for some customers, it likely hasn't had the global effect he claims, let alone had much to do with the U.S., as energy prices were already soaring before the war based on Biden's measures to shut down the U.S. oil industry.  The Saudi refusal to pump extra for him, however, did leave him confronting his failure to pump U.S. energy, so instead of reversing course, as Bill Clinton might have done, he's releasing another 15-million-barrel tranche of oil ahead of midterms.

He implicitly admitted that the gambit was indeed midterm-motivated, by throwing in this in his presser on the matter:

Telling detail: The reserves will be good for getting the U.S. through December...just enough to get midterms safely in the rearview window.

Money quote: "Right now, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is more than half full, with about 400 million barrels of oil.  That's more than enough for any emergency drawdown."

Any emergency drawdown?

Didn't he just say that his release was indeed a legitimate emergency, a Putin emergency?  Why does he need oil for an emergency when he just claimed he was in an emergency?

Seems this isn't — except to Democrats looking at a shellacking at midterms as gasoline prices climb sky-high.  He inadvertently exposed his hand in that bumbling explanation.

Here are some other excerpts:

That's a whopper.  Biden has shut down permits for offshore drilling, shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, and demonized oil companies as price-gouging profiteers in need of government intervention.  Any of those moves would dampen oil production, and he did a raft of them.

There's also this:

So it wasn't Putin who did it, or the Saudis who did it, it was Big Oil.  Big Oil (and all those greedy gas station owners) is the reason behind the surge in gasoline prices.  As for that glib "you'll still do well," that was pure self-interest on Joe's part, begging Big Oil to save his political fortunes as the production shutdowns continue. 

Peter Doocy had an interesting follow-up on that with Biden's press secretary. 

The response, of course was more gaslighting. 

He also had additional nonsense about the impact of spending the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to get his party through midterms:

More gaslighting — everything he's saying here is nonsense, just by math alone.

Lastly, he insisted that prices were coming down anyway, so he's got this.

What nonsense.  Gas prices were around $2 a gallon when President Trump took office and are now $6 a gallon.  Biden's braggadocio about prices going down is roughly parallel to his spokeswoman Jen Psaki's claim that the Fourth of July was on track because the price of hot dogs had gone down a few cents.  That's not going to save him.

Here's the New York Post's cover:

Because Biden has taken on the energy crisis from so many different directions, blaming Putin, Big Oil, emergencies, and more, while carefully omitting the things he is responsible for, it's safe to say he's all over the map on energy.  Like inflation, he has no idea where high energy prices are coming from, and he is clearly in desperation mode, trying to get through midterms without an entirely red wave engulfing him.

It's bathos at this point.  He doesn't know what he's doing.  This is as sorry a performance as any Biden has ever given.

Image: Twitter screen shot.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com