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.
Umm, if he didn't mean it, why did he say it?
"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.
In other words, we understand that the American people are concerned about this issue and we shall be the fore-bearer in paying only the greatest degree of lip service to it.
The reality is that the Saudis, who by the way, weren't to happy with this part of the speech, and Bush know that they both want to keep the American people held hostage to Middle Eastern oil.
1 comment:
Cut Mr. Bush some slack, clearly he is still fighting with a few of the 12 steps (see below) in his battle to overcome this deadly(do not worry..only deadly to our soldiers, not GB) addiction.****
THE 12 STEPS.
1.We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable
2.Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
3.Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of 4.God as we understood God
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
5.Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
6.Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
7.Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
8.Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
9.Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out
12.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs
**I do not mean this literally.{EKS}
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