According to a recent major online news story, “Gas prices are at 7-year highs, and Biden can’t do much about it.”

OK, stop laughing. I said, Stop! This was not a Babylon Bee post.

This was an actual CNN Business story and an atrociously prime example of the mainstream media playing defense for Joe Biden and his clumsy administration of radical nincompoops who put ideology ahead of common sense and practicality.

There’s actually a ton of things Joe Biden could do to restore the nation’s energy independence that he so swiftly and joyfully euthanized last winter with a series of executive orders and decisions that the same media hailed as oh-so refreshingly and thankfully green.

But he just wants the appearance of doing something.

Americans now are paying on average $3.36 a gallon for fuel with expectations the costs will ascend steadily and considerably before year’s end. By comparison, one year ago exactly, when someone else was president, Americans were paying $2.26 a gallon retail.

Are you sitting down? That’s a price increase from a Republican president to a Democrat president of nearly 50 percent (48.54 percent). In just one year.

In January, as Joe Biden Corp. moved into the White House, the gallon price was $2.33. On his first day in the Oval Office, Joe Biden killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, along with the jobs of 40,000 union members who were likely sucker enough to vote for him.

Just four weeks later, the price of gasoline had jumped 26 cents to $2.59. A week after that up another 13 cents.

It didn’t matter if Joe Biden was in his basement, at the beach, or Camp David, the prices just kept going up and drivers’ bank balances going down. Onward and onward — March $2.94, June $3.18, September $3.26.

There seems to be something of a connection here that the mainstream media misses, a connection with Joe Biden threatening future oil supplies with a plethora of moves — canceling drilling leases, barring drilling in vast offshore areas, jawing up the idea of our grandchildren someday maybe driving only electric vehicles, inexplicably helping foreign countries with competitive energy projects.

Markets react to perceived declining supplies with very real price hikes.

Joe Biden also rescinded sanctions on and formally endorsed Vladimir Putin’s immense Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea to Europe that will cripple sales of U.S. LNG sales there and also give the wily Russian leader strategic leverage over NATO members now newly-dependent on his energy supplies.

CNN notes that pesky GOP members are criticizing Biden for the soaring prices “though the blame from Republicans is largely misplaced. Voters don’t like high gas prices and, fair or not, they have a history of blaming whoever is in the White House.”

Fair or not? Who else is pulling off these gambits that hurt the United States?

See, there’s nothing really Joe Biden can do. However, they neglect to note there is so much that Joe Biden could have not done.

Having seriously damaged the country’s energy output, the Biden team is working really hard to ameliorate these higher prices.

“White House weighing steps to address gas shortages.” (The Hill)

“White House asking companies for help lowering gas prices.” (The Hill)

In fact, Joe Biden did ask the oil companies he’s screwing over to help him control gas and home heating oil prices.

Because the United States is no longer energy independent as it was under that mean tweeter as recently as last year, Joe Biden recently asked OPEC oil-producing countries to boost their production.

That would lower the price of oil the U.S. now must import, oh, and cut OPEC’s revenues, too. You know, in the interests of international fellowship.

You may not be surprised to learn OPEC said, No.

Here’s another bold step Joe Biden’s overseeing to control gas prices a year before midterm elections that will doom his legislative agenda if Democrats’ slim congressional control melts away.

Oh, look! That’s exactly what happened back in 2010 during Joe Biden’s first midterm elections as vice president. Democrats have not yet recovered nationally from that electoral shellacking

The bold Biden step to reduce gas price hikes – you still sitting down? – is to have some Cabinet members meet to talk about an answer to stop gas prices going up. Which, just coincidentally, makes their much-vaunted electric vehicles appear more attractive.

Administration spokespeople wouldn’t say what exactly Jennifer Granholm, Tom Vilsack, and Antony Blinken ostensibly discussed to not come up with a solution yet. But claimed they were using every tool in the toolbox.

A meeting. They had a meeting, so they could tell The Hill and Bloomberg News and other sympathetic outlets how determined they wanted to look about doing something on the prices of gasoline and natural gas.

Joe Biden also asked oil companies for help hold down energy prices. Much like the naive or just plain PR stunt list he gave Putin of critical U.S. infrastructures he would appreciate Russians not cyber-hacking.

It seems there’s a concern, a political concern anyway, about the impact of soaring energy prices on the economy and the inflation rate, an invisible tax on every American now running at an alarming 5.4 percent monthly increase year-over-year.

There could conceivably be a connection between the trillions of dollars in new spending under Joe Biden and his party’s congressional teammates and the easily predictable surge in prices to absorb all that newly-printed dough floating around.

Earlier this summer, with the same ignorant smugness he promised to get all Americans out of Afghanistan but didn’t, Joe Biden assured Americans that any apparent inflation was a mere temporary blip as part of the pandemic’s economic recovery.

That’s the same type of argument – don’t you worry it’s just a temporary surge – that Joe Biden used earlier in his administration to allow media to explain the sudden disappearance of the previous administration’s calm on the southern border and the eruption of a chaotic surge of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the country.

See, it’s just seasonal.

They’re not leaving. But it’s just a seasonal surge, see, that’s now continuing into its fourth consecutive season with no sign of abating. A helluva long blip.

Some Americans could get the impression now that Joe Biden, who’ll never drive his own car again, doesn’t mind if Americans can’t afford to drive their own fossil-fueled cars so much anymore. His party is even planning a new tax on every mile actually driven.

Americans could get the impression that Joe Biden says whatever he needs to say to get through a rough patch of news events. And then he continues on doing precisely what’s causing the problems in the first place. And the news media throws up its hands, too, because it’s ever so obvious that Joe “Biden can’t do much about it.”