The Biden Administration’s Perpetual Search for Scapegoats

Good morning, Jolters. On the menu today: The Biden administration continues to cater to progressives by serving up convenient scapegoats at the border and the gas pump. Also, why trouble at the College Republican National Committee matters.

In Search of Monsters

You may recall that last fall, as the Biden administration reeled from its hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, it leapt at the chance to change the course of the news cycle.

Such an opportunity presented itself when images of horse-mounted Border Patrol agents spinning their reins — but not striking anyone — near Haitian migrants attempting to cross into the United States. Unsurprisingly, many in the media nevertheless portrayed the agents as villains. But it was somewhat shocking when the president weighed in with little caution.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary at the time, condemned the supposedly “brutal and inappropriate measures,” being employed.

“To see people treated like they did, horses barely running over, people being strapped — it’s outrageous,” said Biden. “I promise you, those people will pay,” he continued. “There will be an investigation underway now and there will be consequences. There will be consequences.”

Biden foreshadowed the predetermined results of that investigation at the time, and sure enough, it’s being reported that the agents pictured will be punished for the crime of being photographed in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong president in charge. Note that the cameraman responsible for the supposedly incriminating photos stated publicly that he had never seen an agent whip anyone attempting to illegally cross into the United States

As former mounted Border Patrol agents explained to National Review, agents are trained to spin their reins to keep control of their horses. “Spinning the rein is what we do and any horse person that trains horses and has to deal with them, you will find out that they normally spin the end of the rope, and that gets the horse moving,” said George Syer, who used to work as a Border Patrol supervisor in the Rio Grande Valley.

“It’s a training tool, and it’s a training aid if a horse does not want to cooperate with its rider,” said Syer. He went on to say that it is especially helpful in cases in which “you have people in front of the horse and they’re 10 to 15 feet away and they’re raising their arms, they have bags, they’re trying to be aggressive in their body language.”

“If you need to apply additional pressure to that horse in order to make him go, you can spin the two-feet tail of your rein and the horse is gonna go away from the sound of that spinning rein and also the visual of it, because he can see it on the one eye that you’re spinning, that same side,” he said.

Nevertheless, according to a Fox News report, the agents in question will be disciplined in the coming days for “administrative violations,” though they will not be accused of any criminal behavior. They had already been taken off their regular assignments and forbidden from interacting with migrants.

So now members of the Border Patrol, already facing a tidal wave at the border — 239,416 migrants were apprehended at the border in May, the highest one-month total ever —  are watching as their colleagues are punished for merely doing their jobs. All because the president of the United States felt the need to spout off without reference to the facts, despite being in the best position possible to ascertain them.

Biden’s Price Hike

The president is understandably concerned about the consequences of inflation and what they may portend for his party in the 2022 midterms, and possibly his reelection bid in 2024.

Massive increases in the inflation rate and skyrocketing prices at the gas pump could first rob Biden of his agency during the second half of his first term in office. Then they could rob him of the office he holds altogether.

The president is not solely responsible for rising costs. Post-pandemic inflation was a likely consequence of pent-up demands meeting a banged-up supply chain under any administration. And yet, the president’s insistence on pushing through two trillion-dollar spending bills, his huffing and puffing about not being able to spend trillions more, the signals he’s sent to the domestic-oil and gas industry, and his months-long refusal to even acknowledge that there was any problem at all have certainly contributed to the pinching of Americans’ pockets.

And now, after originally trying to pin rising gas prices on Vladimir Putin — Russia’s war on Ukraine certainly didn’t help, but gas prices had been increasing even before the war started — Biden’s turned his attention to the domestic-oil and gas producers. You know, the very industry he promised to “transition from” during his campaign.

In a letter to industry leaders on Tuesday, Biden wrote that “At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable​.”

“Your companies need to work with my Administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions,” he added.

But as CNN’s John Berman pointed out to Energy secretary Granholm, the problem for the companies Biden is making these asks of is that that they’re being asked to make long-term investments even as the government intimates that they have no long-term future:

Moreover, the administration’s own Energy Information Administration says that “refinery utilization will reach a monthly average level of 96% twice this summer, near the upper limits of what refiners can consistently maintain.”

Everyone can see why Biden wants to blame big, bad oil barons for the disaster that has been his energy policy. It’s for the same reason that he wants to shift attention from the crisis at the border to the nonexistent crimes of Border Patrol agents: It allows him to throw red meat to his base while pinning some of the country’s most pressing issues elsewhere.

But it ain’t working. When you’re president, the buck stops with you, and a failure to recognize that immutable fact is the greatest in the long list of Joe Biden’s flaws.

ADDENDUM: Excuse the shameless bit of self-promotion, but check out my report on the dismal state of the College Republican National Committee if you haven’t already. Some might call it silly college-club drama, but College Republicans is where many future leaders in the conservative movement are born, and is thus an institution worthy of good stewardship, rather than self-enrichment.