Joe Brandon has principles. And if you don’t like ‘em, he’s got others.

That Grouchmarxian expression pretty much sums up this president’s position regarding our “friends” the Saudis. You know, the ones who told him to pound sand a couple of months ago when he came to them, hat in hand, and begged them to step up their oil production.

Our collective gas pains have only gotten worse since then, so off he’ll go again, later this month. As The Hill reports:

President Biden and his officials are laying the groundwork for a high-profile meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, reversing course on the campaign promise to isolate the powerful Gulf leader.

Tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are at a high over a range of issues, from the Saudi government’s repression of opposition and its role in the killing of a Washington Post opinion journalist, to Riyadh’s actions in the war in Yemen.

They forgot one other “tension” — that of the Biden administration’s willingness to cave at every turn to the Iranian mullahs in an effort to stitch back together Barack Obama’s awful nuke deal, thanks to which Iran now has enough uranium to produce a nuclear weapon.

How times change. Here’s Tough-Talkin’ Joe during one of the Demo debates in 2019:

I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them, we were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are. There’s very little social redeeming value of the — in the present government in Saudi Arabia.

Biden’s latest kowtow is, as The Washington Post notes, “a remarkable departure from his vow as a presidential candidate to treat the country as a ‘pariah’ state, according to three administration officials who requested anonymity to share details of a trip not yet announced.”

The Post continues: “The relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia ruptured after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and outspoken critic of the Saudi government. American intelligence has concluded that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto leader, ordered the killing of Khashoggi.”

The Post might’ve added that the crown prince’s thugs then cut Khashoggi up into little pieces. But hey, this isn’t about some pesky journalist. It’s about Joe Biden’s approval numbers.

Those Saudi “pariahs” must be laughing their thawbs off.

But why take that trip at all? Why suck up to the Saudis once again? Is oil taken out of the ground in the Arabian peninsula somehow better for the environment or the American economy than oil taken out of the ground in Texas? Or from neighboring Canada through the now-canceled Keystone XL pipeline? Or from that vast northern wasteland known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Nope. In fact, given that our drilling technology is so advanced and our environmental standards so high, it’s certainly worse for the environment.

What a waste of potential. Doesn’t Scranton Joe know that domestic energy-sector jobs are good-paying jobs? Furthermore, doesn’t he know that the U.S. sits atop more oil reserves than any other country in the world — more than Saudi Arabia or Russia? Of course he knows. And yet he’d rather suck up to murdering Saudi princes and shovel American dollars into their coffers.

As our Nate Jackson quipped, Biden seemingly has a sorry new slogan: Drill, baby, drill — anywhere but here.

Anyone else yearn for those awful ultra-MAGA days when we were energy independent and the price at the pump was two bucks a gallon?