How much will the White House have to walk back after President Joe Biden’s trip to Asia?
We’ve already seen his aides essentially retract a comment the president made during a Monday news briefing that seemed to inch us closer to World War III.
Now, comments Biden made earlier in the same briefing — which seemed to indicate soaring gas prices will be the new norm — are coming under scrutiny.
(As Americans pay more at the pump than ever before, The Western Journal will continue to keep the Biden administration accountable by chronicling how its failed green agenda has crippled U.S. consumers. We’ll keep bringing readers the truth — and you can help us by subscribing.)
The remarks came after the president was asked whether a recession in the United States was inevitable during a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo.
A stammering Biden began by attempting to tout “the significant progress we’ve made in making sure we don’t have supply chain backups” and “the situation where we — we’ve created over 8 million new jobs, where unemployment is down to 3.6 percent, and so on and so forth,” claiming people were discussing them “as if they’re a problem.
“Imagine where we’d be with Putin’s tax and the war in Ukraine had we not made that enormous progress,” Biden said.
Ah yes, that darned “Putin tax” again. The president has claimed on many occasions that the Kremlin is responsible for Americans’ pain at the pump, despite the fact that the price for a gallon of gas jumped from $2.379 the week Biden took office to $3.530 the week before Russian leader Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Is Biden responsible for high gas prices?
This time, however, Biden seemed to indicate the high gas prices are here to stay.
“When it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” he said.
Joe Biden: “When it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an INCREDIBLE transition” pic.twitter.com/8TGnc7vFa8
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 23, 2022
“You see what Europe is doing relative to the importation of Russian gas. You see what — anyway, I won’t go through it all, but,” Biden said, trailing off slightly.
“And what I’ve been able to do to keep it from getting even worse — and it’s bad,” he continued.
“The price of gas at the pump is something that I told you — you heard me say before — it would be a matter of great discussion at my kitchen table when I was a kid growing up. It’s affecting a lot of families.
“But we have released over two hundred and, I think, fifty-seven thousand — million barrels of oil, I should say,” he added. “Us and the rest of the world we convinced to get involved.
“It’s helped, but it’s not been enough.”
Biden later signaled he would ask members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to start pumping more oil.
According to the AAA, Tuesday’s national average price of a gallon of gas hit an all-time high of $4.598, up from $4.12 a month ago and $3.04 a year ago.
In no state was the average price under $4 a gallon, either.
Mind you, the idea of an “incredible transition” away from fossil fuels being responsible for high gas prices might not be the only thing the White House has to walk back from this media briefing.
Later on, Biden signaled the United States was dropping its stance of “strategic ambiguity” toward the defense of Taiwan by telling a reporter who asked if his administration was “willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan” that this was “the commitment we made.”
Earlier in the briefing, however, he said that American policy toward Taiwan “has not changed at all.” Bloomberg reported that a spokeswoman for the White House “repeated that comment after Biden’s remarks, saying the president reiterated the US’s ‘One China Policy’ and its commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the military means to defend itself.”
Apparently, someone at the White House realized Biden had signed us on for World War III again, just like when he called for regime change in Russia during a speech in March — and, just like on that occasion, the president’s handlers quickly walked the statement back.
If the White House doesn’t walk back the “incredible transition” comment, however, it won’t be a surprise. Hurtful though it may be to the party’s short-term electoral goals, high gas prices are a feature — not a bug — for those who want to see a whiplash transition away from fossil fuels and a suicidal, self-imposed target of a 50 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, which the administration has committed us to.
Biden’s policies since taking office indicate he’s pursued this “incredible transition” with enormous zeal — ending the Keystone XL pipeline project, canceling new energy exploration leases on federal land and very publicly hoping that his administration’s electric vehicle push will somehow cancel it all out.
(It wouldn’t even at the best of times, but that’s especially true now that there are waiting lists to purchase EVs that are sometimes well over a year long.)
The president’s strategy for lowering gas prices has involved a) releasing barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and b) calling on OPEC to increase its production of oil.
The first measure isn’t working now, as the president acknowledged, and the second hasn’t worked in the past.
But those, if one were to judge by the president’s comments Monday in Tokyo, are the only measures he plans to take to ease the “great transition” to the shaky, inflation- and question-riddled green future his administration has charted for us.
Gas prices may be “bad,” as the president acknowledged Monday, but Biden’s energy policy going into the November midterm elections seems to be: “Get Used to It, America.”
We’ll see how that works, but my guess is that isn’t a winning strategy for the Democrats.
