It’s a primary function of their inflation argument, so it’s been going on for a while. And it has the feel of the kind of idea a bunch of Good Ol’ Boys dreamed up, to a lot of guffaws and backslapping, in some cigar smokey country club lounge in North Carolina. Ha HAW, Billy! You mean we oughta…blame it all on Biden? Blame Biden for inflation? Call it #Bidenflation?

But with Russia’s ongoing (illegal, immoral) invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are even outdoing themselves in disingenuous duplicity. Ban Russian oil, they’ve started demanding from the top down. (Ironic, since they spent the better part of the Trump administration claiming that boycotts were anti-American, yet here we are.)

It’s a dramatic one-two punch that corresponds, sadly, alarmingly, with the past 5 years’ Orwellian trend in Republican misinformation: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”