As expected, on Tuesday, President Biden announced that he would end U.S. imports of Russian oil. It’s assumed he didn’t want to, since he has let it go on all through the buildup to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and past the first two weeks of shocking carnage. But after even Nancy Pelosi agreed with Ted Cruz (one of the signs of the Apocalypse) that Congress should act and cut off Russian oil, Biden reportedly asked Pelosi to delay Monday’s scheduled House vote so that he could jump out in front of the parade and pretend to be leading it.

In the speech, Biden warned Americans that gas prices, which shot up even further beyond previous records on Tuesday, would go up even more because of the cutoff of Russian oil. But apparently, his plan is to replace Russian oil with banana oil, because he dispensed so much of it in his speech as he attempted to convince Americans that “Russia is responsible” for a gallon of gas costing more than a Burger King Whopper. (I chose that because there were plenty of whoppers in the speech, too.)

Biden’s Jaw-Droppers

The first thing that caught my ear was Biden’s carefully-constructed phrase “Putin’s price hikes,” laid on with all the subtlety of a 10-year-old boy standing by a broken vase and pointing at the cat. As the media would say, “Republicans pounced” on that. Jorge Bonilla tweeted a couple of charts, the first one having already gone viral, showing how the price of gas has been climbing since the day Biden took office, with the recent “Ukraine war” spike representing only a fraction of the increase.

The second chart was the same, except it went back even further and showed that the rise in gas prices actually began right after Election Night, when oil futures investors realized that Biden would be replacing Trump. Trump had made energy independence and low gas prices a priority, while Biden had campaigned on destroying our domestic fossil fuel industry in the name of fighting “climate change.” No wonder Trump sent out a message in response that consisted of nothing but the headline about record gas prices, and one sentence: “Do you miss me yet?”

It Simply Is True

But that was hardly the end of the Biden jaw-droppers. I guess he thinks we can save energy by returning to gas lighting, which is the only way to explain lines like this:

First, it’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. It’s simply not true.

Except it simply is true. Thanks to his policies, U.S. oil and gas production are down by more than a million gallons a day. Again, that was actually one of his campaign promises, to kill the fossil fuel industry, and he started doing it with executive orders on his first day in office.

Blame Those Bad Oil Companies

He also tried to blame the oil companies, saying they had 9,000 permits to drill and it was their decision not to use them to produce oil. An industry spokesman replied that that reflects a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how the industry works, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. Not only are government drilling leases down by about 75%, but a lease doesn’t even mean there’s oil on the land. There’s a long process of development to explore and start pumping the oil, and Biden has not only cut the number of leases but added lots more regulations to hamstring that process even more.

Here’s a former Keystone Pipeline worker who urges Americans not to buy this blame-shifting and reminds us that they tried to warn everyone what was coming. Hey, join the club, pal!

Toni Williams at the Victory Girls blog also has a good rundown of the many lies packed into that one speech.

And Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com did a good fact-check as well.

Let Them Buy Teslas!

But to me, the biggest tip-off that we are dealing with people who are completely out of touch with the reality of the pain they’re causing for working Americans was that both Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg actually suggested that the solution to high gas prices was for everyone to buy electric cars.

The average price of an EV is over $56,000; there’s a long waiting list to obtain one just with the demand that exists now; and even if every American could afford and obtain one, they’ve still never answered where we’re going to get the power required to charge them all. It’s as if they think regular cars run on bad, dirty gas but the fuel for electric cars comes out of a wall socket directly from Heaven.

With that argument, Biden, Buttigieg and their house jester Stephen Colbert are all competing for the title of the Marie Antoinette of the 21st century: “So the peasants can’t afford gas? Well, let them buy Teslas!”

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN. 

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.