At first, President Joe Biden tried to play off rising inflation as something merely transitory. But the inflation kept rising until it wasn’t transitory anymore, so he needed a better excuse. Biden then tried to scapegoat the meat industry for raising prices arbitrarily. Remember that? Nobody believed it. But when President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, that gave Biden an off-ramp from such an implausible explanation, so he chose to blame Russia. The problem this time was that inflation had been running wild for so many months before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.