Biden isn’t to blame for rising oil prices. Or gas prices: “Energy analysts say other factors — which predate the Biden administration — are responsible”. Charles Pierce of Esquire uses colorful language to say we should look elsewhere:

Since it seems that the elite political media is going to define everything except the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament through the price of gasoline—CNN should open a bureau at that one gas station that is clearly overcharging people . . .

When did the consensus among us common folk break down that the oil companies are a miserable flock of price-gouging harpies interested only in lining their own pockets, despoiling land and sea and contributing to the planet’s self-immolation? I mean, Deepwater Horizon wasn’t that long ago. . . .

So now, as Ukraine fights to remain an independent nation, and as the economic recovery from a worldwide pandemic rolls on largely unacknowledged by much of the elite political press, the oil company executives, who currently hold a plethora of oil leases, are shoveling the money they’re gouging out of the rest of us to their shareholders rather than plowing it into developing the leases they already own. From the New York Times:

In his broad Oklahoma twang and in language that will be heard repeatedly in the next few months, [former Democratic senator Fred Harris] . . .  said that Congress should “break up” the major oil companies, which he contends illegally control both production and marketing of petroleum products.

Where have you gone, Fred Harris? Your party turns its lonely eyes to you.

Unquote.

Some facts from Dana Milbank of The Washington Post: