Sorry Crown Prince Abdullah, We Din' Mean It!

That whole "reduce dependence on foreign oil" thing? just funnin'.

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.

I didn't think "America is addicted to oil, and we must break this addiction" meant "we must slow the growth of this addiction, yet still remain as addicted as we are now." But I'm not good at Beltway-speak.

It's amazing to me that anyone takes this guy seriously anymore. I read reviews on this speech as if any word in them would have meaning beyond last night. Puh-leeze.

This is just hilarious:

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

"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.

He should fear that his remarks might get him laughed out of the country. The President said "end dependence on Middle Eastern oil" but meant exactly the opposite because the American people are stupid? Oh, OK.

Was ANYTHING true in that speech?