Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) has been running a heavy flight of campaign ads across state TV channels in the past week or so, blaming Democrats and President Biden for high gas prices, deficit spending, and inflation. Even though It's all way too pat and simplistic, I imagine those lies will work on some GOP base voters. Still, they are lies. Even Politifact Wisconsin sees that, so far focusing only on the senator's gasoline-price claims. But trust me, the rest of RoJo's ad is equally misleading. After all:
In four years Trumpublicans including Johnson ran up the national debt by nearly eight thousand billion dollars (for the zero-challenged that's $8,000,000,000,000). Meanwhile that little inconvenience called the COVID pandemic -- which has killed ONE MILLION Americans officially and unofficially up to six times that many -- triggered a giant recession all by itself. Clearly Biden's fault -- not. But Johnson's and Trump's slow and disbelieving reactions surely made the pandemic worse.
And now the Russia-Ukraine war is further ramping up the worldwide supply-chain problem and putting further pressure on prices. But the senator wears blinders to all that and expects you to don a horse halter along with him. Expect to bite hard into the metal bit when The Previous Guy and his minions pull back your reins some more, but don't blame Democratic lawmakers for steering you their way.
Maybe if GOP politicians including Johnson and Trump hadn't praised and coddled Vladimir Putin (and in Johnson's case shown up with other Republican congressmen on Putin's virtual doorstep in Moscow during one American Independence Day), we wouldn't have to deal with that last crisis, which Johnson like other Republicans would like to pin on Biden. Ridiculous. Nevertheless, thanks to the way campaigns and campaign spending now work, ,it will be hard though not impossible to kick this empty suit out of the Senate in November. Do not doubt that we of good conscience in Wisconsin are trying.