Reducing The Addiction to Foreign Oil

Apart from the HSA announcement at the SotU speech last night, The President dropped another bombshell [and no, I'm not talking about his strange apparent fear of Humanzees, Manimals and Humicorns] on the Union last night:

He will singlehandedly reduce America's Addiction to Foriegn Oil, replacing 75% of our imports by the year 2025 with alternative energy supplies!

Holy shmoly, did we just hear that correctly?

Along with everybody else who saw and heard the speech, the WaPo sure thinks so:

President Bush set an ambitious goal in his State of the Union address: break the country's addiction to oil and move beyond a petroleum-based economy.

Bush's remarks on Tuesday night follow in the path of previous U.S. presidents, including Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter, who pledged to limit reliance on foreign oil.

...
That growing demand has made the United States all the more dependent on oil from what Bush called "unstable parts of the world."

He said technological breakthroughs encouraged by his plan "will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

Yessir, undoubtedly that's what Mr. President said in his State of The Union Address. It's right there. Right in front of you: This administration has said that we'll remove 75% of our imported oil energy needs and replace it with alternative fuel models.

Except...

This little political stunt - you know, the one where anti-environmental oil-baron moron President Bush tries to, and succeeds with getting compared to nuclear scientist Nobel prize winning former president Carter [and disgraced, resigned president Nixon] doesn't sit so well with some figures pretty high up there- and people not traditionally at odds with The Administration.

Wondering who I'm talking about?

I mean... yes... The Administration doesn't agree with The Administration!

Let me be clear. In a follow-up interview with journalists about the new energy policies set forward, a panel including Bush's own Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman pointed out this dubious truth:

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.

The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and his call to "break this addiction."

Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

Not exactly, though, it turns out.

"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

Presidential adviser Dan Bartlett made a similar point in a briefing before the speech. "I think one of the biggest concerns the American people have is oil coming from the Middle East. It is a very volatile region," he said.

See, it's a metaphor.

Or it's just an outright political manipulation- yet another fabricated "truth", with the president staring straight out at all of America- and not coming clean. Writing poetry, metaphors for us to intrepret. Playing language games.