On his first day in office, the inept Joe Biden began his crusade against American-produced fossil fuels. He canceled the Keystone pipeline and leases on federal lands and waters. As predictable as the sunrise, gas prices spiked. A gallon was $2.39 on his first day, hit $5.02 this past June before temporary price reductions, and now it’s $3.92 and again on the rise.

When Biden realized this far-reaching economic catastrophe presented a polling problem, he began flailing. He blamed greedy oil companies. He blamed Vladimir Putin. He released tens of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, depleting it for no good reason. He went hat in hand to OPEC, begging for more production. In August 2021, OPEC told him to pound sand. This summer, he tried again, even fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). OPEC cut production by two million barrels per day, disregarding Biden’s plea that the announcement be delayed a month — conveniently until after November’s elections.

“No one f***s with a Biden,” the president was caught saying on a hot mic last week. Well, except the Saudis and OPEC, who know political election shenanigans when they see them.

The administration steadfastly insists this has nothing to do with American politics, but rather is a problem for world oil markets. “It’s categorically false to connect this to U.S. elections,” huffed Adrienne Watson, a National Security Council spokeswoman. “It’s about the impact of this shortsighted decision to the global economy.”

Moreover, Team Biden is threatening Saudi Arabia for the snub. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby warned Tuesday that the administration will “take a look to see if that relationship is where it needs to be and that it is serving our national security interests.”

Tough guy Biden talked even tougher a few hours later. “There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve done with Russia,” he groused last night. “I’m not going to get into what I’d consider and what I have in mind. But there will be consequences.”

You know what has consequences, Mr. President? Deliberately making the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil. Donald Trump worked with energy companies to make the U.S. energy independent and a net exporter for the first time in decades. Due to Biden bowing to his party’s ecofascists and succumbing to Trump Derangement Syndrome — whatever Trump did, do the opposite — here we are paying a ton more for gas and diesel and for everything shipped anywhere in the U.S.

The inflationary consequences of Biden’s climate crusade cannot be overstated, and yet Democrats want even more ecofascism.

Their own culpability hasn’t stopped them from joining in Biden’s threats. “Let’s be very candid about this,” Senator Dick Durbin said. “It’s Putin and Saudi Arabia against the United States.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Ro Khanna promised legislation cutting arms sales to Saudi Arabia. “I would do more than reevaluate. I would act immediately,” Blumenthal argued. “He has been misled and double-crossed, and I don’t think he should or will take lightly to it.”

The problem is Biden’s policy, both foreign and domestic. We’ve covered the domestic side, but regarding Saudi Arabia, Biden has called it a “pariah state,” foolishly making the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi a focal point of U.S.-Saudi relations. It’s not that the murder wasn’t reprehensible but that, for one thing, Khashoggi was a sympathizer and boyhood friend of Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t exactly an American Patriot but was instead a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporter of establishing an Islamic state. Biden went out of his way to make it known to his pals in the American press that he took MBS to the woodshed over a murder the CIA says he ordered.

Aside from personally insulting the Saudi crown prince, Biden is courting the Saudis’ enemies in Tehran, stubbornly trying to resurrect Barack Obama’s disastrous Iran nuclear “deal” and criticizing Saudi efforts to fight Iranian proxies in Yemen.

Did Biden somehow expect poor policies to not have … consequences? At a bear minimum, someone who’s bragged about his IQ as much as Scranton Joe has should know that his treatment of the Saudis and handling of Middle East policy more generally would never motivate them to do him any favors. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The maddening part is that we’re all paying for Biden’s colossal failures.

It’s worth pondering the way Andrew McCarthy puts things in perspective: “Is MBS a monster? Of course he is. But we didn’t put him in charge, nor did we shape him. He is simply a complicated fact of life with which we have to deal — just like the Muslim Brotherhood. It is not our government’s burden, it is not within our government’s competence, to fix Saudi Arabia or the Muslim Middle East. Our government’s job is to pursue America’s interests in the world.”