Congressional Republicans are being slammed as “cynical and craven” for attacking President Joe Biden over rising gas prices triggered by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with some calling their partisan attacks against the president “an unconscionable act of political cowardice.”
David Smith, The Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, wrote that “while Republicans have expressed solidarity with Joe Biden’s stance on Russia with one hand, they are launching partisan attacks against the president with the other” and are seizing on soaring US gas prices “to exploit the tragedy in Ukraine for its own political benefit.”
“Republicans backed Biden’s ban on Russian oil imports but simultaneously went on an offensive that effectively absolved Putin of blame,” Smith wrote on Saturday, singling out House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy who said during a press conference: “These aren’t Putin prices. They’re President Biden’s prices.”
Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, said: “It just goes to show that there are no lengths to which Republicans won’t stoop to try to score political points, in this case using the unthinkable and tragic situation that the Ukrainian people find themselves in.
“To try to exploit that and use it to effectively lie and mislead the American people about conditions here at home is an unconscionable act of political cowardice,” he added, according to The Guardian.
Bardella added that “Republicans have spent the past two decades opposing the very measures that would have made America less dependent on foreign oil and fossil fuels in general,” adding that Green Technology would have shielded the US from the effects of the Ukraine crisis on global markets.
“Republicans were so vocal about how the Biden administration needed to do sanctions on Russian oil and then they start attacking him. You can’t win because everything that they do is basically an illustration of how they operate in bad faith,” he said.
“Joe Biden could do every single thing that the Republican party wants and they would still attack him at the end of the day. Republicans just seem to operate in a purely craven political dynamic. It’s irresponsible and downright un-American, and it’s exactly what they would have said if Democrats had done this in the wake of 9/11 or in the run up to the war on terror.”
Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations, said: “‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Biden is going to own whatever the economy is come November. Republicans don’t have to do anything to make that happen. People feel it for themselves, they observe for themselves.”
But he added: “It’s preposterous to think this is Biden’s fault. He hasn’t done anything that would account for high gas prices at this point. It’s the Russians’ fault but the Republicans want to ban Russian oil and then blame Biden for the shortfall in supplies and therefore the rise in prices. It’s cynical, obvious and opportunistic.”
The Guardian also slammed Fox News for promoting the false argument that Biden is to blame for the rising gas prices, calling it “a convenient way to deflect attention from their own complicated relationship with Russia.”
Read the full report in The Guardian.
