The Biden administration has developed a habit of describing its own actions as “historic.” It is not always wrong. But so much of what the White House touts as “historic” are landmark events only insofar as they are historically bad.

The petroleum reserve is being utilized for its intended purpose: to provide relief during an energy supply shock resulting from a foreign crisis. However, the last two times the Biden administration tapped into it, it was a gimmicky effort to relieve the pain of inflation’s effects on consumer prices across the board.

That inflation — a byproduct of supply chain breakdowns, resulting increased overhead costs and labor shortages — is not entirely attributable to the Biden administration’s policies. But the contributions this administration did make to the problem of inflation were also praised as “historic” by this White House…

It’s understandable that Biden administration officials feel the need to pretend that objectively atrocious circumstances are actually wondrous if looked at in the proper light. If we were only being subjected to spin, we’d be witnessing nothing more remarkable than a few acts of elementary political hygiene. But this is not spin. We are being asked to ignore the evidence of our own eyes, internalize an untruth and regurgitate it in service to the White House’s political fortunes.