The last few days have been a whirlwind for normal Americans as gas and energy prices have skyrocketed. Some of that is due to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Most of the price increases occurred prior to that point, though, with gas going up over a dollar per gallon during Joe Biden’s first year in office.

When gas prices go up, everything goes up. Grocery prices have exploded and you can bet the prices of non-perishable goods and services will be rising precipitously now as well.

Yet, instead of trying to help Americans, Biden is busy shifting the blame and refusing to take basic steps to mitigate their financial pain. On Tuesday, he attempted to blame Putin for the totality of the energy price increases, which is just an insulting bit of gaslighting.

BIDEN: "I'm going to do everything I can to minimize Putin's price hike here at home." pic.twitter.com/j5EMRicV7w

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 8, 2022

Sorry, that dog isn’t going to hunt. Everyone reading this is more than three weeks old, which means we remember seeing gas go from $1.60 to $3.00 after Biden won the 2020 election (those are my local prices, but it’s been repeated in the same degree all over the country, even if the starting point was higher). Yes, Putin’s move to invade Ukraine has pushed prices even higher, but that still represents a fraction of the total increase Americans have absorbed with Biden in office. It is absolutely false to try to now frame this entire debacle as a result of Russian aggression.

But this is who Joe Biden is. He’s a coward who can never admit when he’s wrong, even when the writing is on the wall in black sharpie. He’d rather let the working class be crushed by his policies than even consider changing course. Case in point? During this same speech, instead of hearing the calls for more domestic energy production and the green-lighting of pipelines from Canada to increase supply, the president once again pushed Green New Deal “solutions” that are anything but.

Biden literally touting Green New Deal as best way to defeat Putin:

“Transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles powered by clean energy with tax credits to help American families winterize their homes and use less energy —that will. That will help."

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) March 8, 2022

This kind of thing makes me want to go punch a wall. Let’s put aside the fact that government investment programs always turn out to be wasteful boondoggles (and this one will be). Let’s even pretend that electric vehicles and winterizing homes will lower energy usage over the long term and save Americans money (they won’t because that ignores a host of other variables). What does any of that have to do with the here and now? You are talking decades before Americans would see any substantial benefit from the usage of tax credits and other investments to push green energy proposals.

Specifically, on the topic of electric vehicles, even if everyone had $60,000+ to go out and buy one right now, there aren’t enough of them to buy. The lead time on getting a new EV can be anymore from six months to multiple years right now. Further, even if you could provide EVs to most Americans somehow, most would have nowhere to charge them. How does a person who lives in an apartment charge their EV? Almost no one has a 220 outlet in their garage, and that’s if they are lucky enough to have a garage. Past that, commercial charging stations, which are rare, result in prices that rival gas prices, because again, the energy has to come from somewhere.

So Biden’s big solution to the gas price crisis is to tell middle-class Americans to go buy electric cars that they can’t get, that they can’t charge, and that cost so much that it’d take decades to realize the cost savings. Again, it’s enough to make you want to go punch a wall.

For a long time, I looked at Biden as an aloof, incompetent, doofus, and sure, he’s absolutely that. But his presidency has made clear that he’s also a vindictive, stubborn old man who would see Americans driven into abject poverty if it meant realizing his leftwing utopia. It’s disgusting to witness such a lack of empathy.