You gotta hand it to Joe Biden … when he settles on a lie, he won’t ever let it go. As Captain of the S.S. Liar Liar, he’ll go down with the ship if he has to.
And the big lie he’s pushing now is that high gas prices and inflation are Putin’s fault, not his.
On Thursday, we learned that inflation high a 40-year high in February, primarily due to the increase in gas prices, with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumping 7.9% over a year prior.
And it’s all “Blame Putin” at the White House.
“Today’s inflation report is a reminder that Americans’ budgets are being stretched by price increases and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike,” Biden said in a statement Thursday. “A large contributor to inflation this month was an increase in gas and energy prices as markets reacted to Putin’s aggressive actions. As I have said from the start, there will be costs at home as we impose crippling sanctions in response to Putin’s unprovoked war, but Americans can know this: the costs we are imposing on Putin and his cronies are far more devastating than the costs we are facing.”
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy put the breaks on that narrative, telling Fox Business, “no one is buying Democrats’ desperate excuses for inflation, but everyone is paying for them.”
He’s right. Gas prices and inflation have been going up for months, and the White House is trying to convince the public that it’s only been happening recently and that Putin bears sole responsibility for it.
“The Biden administration will certainly be scrambling to spin today’s disastrous inflation numbers, but they should simply look in the mirror,” McCarthy said. “Exactly one year ago, Democrats rammed through an unnecessary and wasteful $2 trillion bill to fund liberal pet projects.”
“Predictably, this reckless spending binge supercharged inflation,” he added.
But you don’t have to take any Republican’s word for it. Biden’s efforts to rebrand the ongoing inflation crisis and high gas prices as the “Putin Price Hike” won’t succeed. Why not? Because even Biden’s biggest cheerleaders aren’t buying that garbage.
On Thursday, Christine Romans, CNN’s chief business correspondent, noted that inflation was accelerating well before the Russian invasion.
“Inflation is accelerating, these are pre-war numbers as well,” Romans said. “Many people had thought we’d see a peak in inflation in March maybe, well now we have a war in Russia, not captured — war in Ukraine — not captured here.”
She also noted that the month-over-month increase of 0.8% indicates that “inflation is accelerating,” and not simply starting now because of Putin’s invasion, as the Biden White House wants us to believe. “All these things you basically can’t live without are rising here,” Romans continued. “You can see just why so many Americans are so sour on the economy…because they’re paying more for just about everything.”
“And again, these numbers don’t capture the big disruption in the economy from Putin’s war in Ukraine,” Romans said.
CNN’s Romans: Under Biden, Americans face the highest consumer price spike in 40 years.
Inflation was “accelerating” even BEFORE the Ukraine crisis. pic.twitter.com/pT5IeOr6YP
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 10, 2022
When Biden can’t even convince CNN, you know he’s on a fool’s errand. Just as his attempts to blame his botched Afghanistan withdrawal on Trump failed, so will his efforts to blame inflation on Putin. It’s time for Biden to own up to his failures instead of playing the blame game. Honestly, we’d all have a little more respect for him if he just manned up.