Once Again: Everything He Says Is A Lie

[filkertom]

Major point Dubya made in the SOTU Address turns out to be just like everything else he says:

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.

By way of The Daily Kos.

Comments

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Seriously, I'm amazed that it took less than twenty-four hours to backpedal on that one. Symptomatic of the problem, no?

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Well of course. His lips were moving.

[mrfnord.livejournal.com]

Well, fuck. That didn't last long.

I'd have thought they'd give it at least a week before they started downplaying that.

[hughcasey.livejournal.com]

As soon as I heard that, my first thought was "he can't promise that."

As is quoted above, oil is traded as a commodity between the different oil and energy companies. When you stop at, say, a Chevron, to gas up the car, you may not be buying gas that was drilled for or refined by Chevron. They may have bought it from Exxon/Mobil, or Sun Oil, or Lukoil, or any other company. And they may have purchased it from the US, or from Russia, or from the Saudi Arabian Oil Company. And at some point, either at the distributor(s), or at the refiner(s), or while in storage waiting for delivery, the oil from different sources GET MIXED TOGETHER! So you don't know WHERE the gas/oil you're buying came from.

The point is not to reduce the amount of oil we BUY from the Middle East. The point is to reduce the amount we CONSUME. And they are only way to do that, as the Admin spokesman said, is "...to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives."

What Bush did was to oversimplify the policy to be understandable by the lowest common denominator. He's a former oilman... he freakin' knows better. And this sort of dumbing down of policy is one of the major problems with our government today... we end up being ruled by the LEAST educated among us. Personally, I was someone SMARTER than me running things, thankyouverymuch! As it is, what Jefferson called "The Tyranny Of The Majority" is giving us an Elected Autocracy. I am hoping that the current adminstration ends up going SO over the top in subsuming power to the executive branch that there is a backlash, and power gets shifted back to the Legislative and Judicial branches again. Yes, it's much more messy, that is the beauty of representative democracy... it keeps the politicians too busy to do much damage! *grin*

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

As I exlained to Kathryn today, the president was so desperate, he was willing to mouth some interesting environmental ideas to appear innovative, if only for 90 minutes. "That long?" she said. "Well, the speech is over now."

But there's a vague possibility that it will spark some investment in sawgrass (a more viable long-term crop for ethanol, I understand). We'll see about the private investment, even if this is one more example of the president's amazing willingness to suspend factuality.

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

Of course, anyone left who'd even give The Idiot-In-Chief the merest hint of the possibility of the benefit of the doubt is a freaking moron anyway.

Naturally the call for energy independence was an outright lie. He was breathing, wasn't he? Therefore he was lying. Simple.

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Did you hear what the oil industry is saying about this? The Competitive Enterprise Institute (i.e., oil industry's hired mouthpiece, who once tried to claim that oil spills actually helped the local environment) said this:

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"The president's dangerous rhetoric that we are addicted to oil is an indication that the administration is addicted to confused thinking about energy policies," says Myron Ebell, director of energy policy for CEI. "As bad as the policies proposed by President Bush are, the addiction rhetoric is much worse. President Bush might as well have said, 'We're addicted to prosperity, comfort, and mobility, and I've got the policies to do something about it.'"

The CEI says it's time for Bush to get back to dancing with the ones who brung him. "The goals and methods the president announced in his State of the Union address will be hindrances and obstacles to creating a bright energy future for American consumers," Ebell says. "They will interfere with the working of the market that provides incentives for increasing supplies and for technological innovations. In taking these steps in the wrong direction, President Bush also seems to have forgotten the positive energy policies that he has promoted in the past. These include removing the political and legal obstacles to exploiting America's vast conventional energy resources, such as opening portions of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf to oil and gas development."
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Maybe nobody told them Bush was just kidding ;-)

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

They figure if they attack The Idiot, people will assume that The Idiot must, in fact, be a closet environmentalist just this side of Al Gore. It's a pretty sick game they're playing, made even more disturbing by the fact that some people will *believe* it.

[batyatoon]

Is there a way other than literally to mean as specific a statement as "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025"?

I mean, is there a semantic difference here between "he didn't mean that literally" and "he didn't mean that"?