If you had the unpleasant experience this July 4th weekend of paying close to $5 for a gallon of gas, you can always take solace in the idea that your pain is for a good cause: the “liberal world order.”
So said Brian Dees, director of the White House National Economic Council, when asked on CNN: “What do you say to those families who say, ‘Look, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years. That’s just not sustainable?’
Dease, like his boss Joe Biden, is unmoved by the plight of ordinary Americans, more than two-thirds of whom say gas price hikes are causing them hardship, according to a recent Gallup poll.
“This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we must stand firm” until Ukraine defeats Russia, Dees said.
He echoed the president, who mentioned the war in Ukraine a few hours earlier in Madrid, when he dismissed a similar question: “The war raised prices. [Oil] it can reach up to 200 dollars per barrel. . . How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay this premium for this war?”
Biden responded with cold indifference: “As much as it takes,” he said.
Where is the empathy?
That’s quite a view from a president who has built on the illusion that he possesses special empathy.
He could do something about gas prices – which have nearly doubled since he took office – by increasing domestic supplies. He could do something about the skyrocketing energy prices that are fueling inflation worldwide. America is blessed with abundant resources that made us energy independent until he came along.
President Biden said gas prices will remain astronomical “as long as it takes” to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. AP/Evan Vucci
But Biden has no intention of antagonizing the environmental radicals in his party or disappointing the European climate evangelists who are anointing him.
Biden is determined to ride the donkey of the climate apocalypse into the history books as the president who launched America’s decarbonization revolution, a revolution that only the elevated protected classes desire.
So he does the opposite of what America needs and tries to blame inflation on greedy gas stations and oil companies or his all-encompassing villain, Russia, Russia, Russia.
“My message to the gas station companies and gas station price setters is simple: this is a time of war and global danger,” Biden tweeted Saturday afternoon before heading to Camp David on his record 18th visit as President. “Reduce the price you charge at the pump to reflect the price you pay for the product. And do it now.”
Or what?
Even Amazon millionaire Jeff Bezos couldn’t give up on this gaslighting. “Oh,” he tweeted back. “Inflation is too important an issue for the White House to keep making statements like this.”
Not in Biden’s mind. He believes he is a great statesman, making his mark on the world stage on the supposed “existential problem of our time” while pretending to ordinary people at home that he feels their pain.
But no one is fooled. Biden’s actions to limit America’s production—and consumption—of fossil fuels are deliberate and ideological, just like his disastrous open-borders policy.
The Biden administration has said it plans to block all new offshore oil drilling in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. AP/Jon Fahey
On his first day in the Oval Office, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. He banned new drilling permits and leases, discouraged companies from investing in expanded refinery capacity, threatened banks to stop financing American oil, gas and coal, and tried to appoint a climate activist as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, to to name a few highlights in his war on fossil fuels.
On Friday night, after the country had packed up for the weekend, his administration quietly slipped the news that it plans to block all new offshore oil drilling in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, perhaps or not leaving the door open to limited expansion in Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Biden knows his open hostility to fossil fuels discourages the kind of long-term investment by oil and gas companies that would increase supplies and lower prices, but he pretends otherwise.
When he wrote a threatening letter to oil company executives last month, complaining that they were making too much money and not producing enough oil “in wartime,” the blow was brutal.
Chevron said in a statement that the administration continues to “impose obstacles to our industry supplying the energy resources the world needs.”
As GasBuddy oil industry analyst Patrick DeHaan tweeted: “The White House is asking the oil companies to improve the situation. Can we drill? We’d rather you weren’t. Can we build a refinery? We’d rather you weren’t. Can we build a pipeline? We’d rather you weren’t. Just make it better.
Political theater
Everyone knows that Biden’s proposed 90-day gas tax holiday is a Band-Aid, not as helpless as draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for short-term relief, but just as pathetic.
French President Emmanuel Macron told Biden that the Saudis cannot increase their oil production. Jonathan Ernst/Pool via AP
But Biden thinks that if he pretends to care about our pain, he can get away with this cynical theater.
His plan to go to the Middle East later this month to beg for more oil is another ploy that French President Emmanuel Macron was shrewd enough to sabotage last week in Germany.
“I had a conversation with MBZ [Emirates leader Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan]Macron told Biden near the media gathered for the G7.
“He told me two things. One, I’m maxed out, maxed out [production capacity] . . . Second, according to MBZ, the Saudis can increase a bit, by 150 [thousand barrels per day]but they don’t have huge capacity.
It’s as if the administration doesn’t know.
Biden now claims that begging for oil was never the purpose of his trip to the Middle East: “No, I’m not going to beg them.”
So what is Plan B?
I think we have our answer.
Suck it up, for the sake of the liberal world order – which is just code for putting America last.
Special Fourth for an innocent New Yorker raided by the FBI
It’s been 17 months, but Joseph Bolanos had a happy start to the July 4th weekend when the FBI finally returned seven boxes of his property.
He still has no excuse for being dragged out of bed in a dawn raid by 10 FBI agents pointing a rifle at his head in February 2021. Agents had a search warrant to ransack his apartment and seize his property because a crime he did not commit — accusations that he participated in the Capitol riot on January 6. In fact, he was nowhere near the building at the time.
The FBI raids the Upper West Side home of Joseph Bolanos in February 2021 because of the January 6 Capitol riot. Matthew McDermott
He had two strokes, spent a fortune on lawyers, and his reputation as the respected president of his Upper West Side block association for 23 years was in tatters. But all’s well that ends well for the vivacious 70-year-old community member.
“After living under a dark cloud of stress and suspicion for 17 months, I feel like the sky is clearing and I’m lucky to be alive,” he said.
“The case is closed on their end, which is important.”
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