Thursday, February 02, 2006

Fool me once, shame on me ...


And once again, a journalist gets conned into believing that George W. Bush actually means what he says. From this morning's Grope and Flail, the latest victim is gullible sucker Alan Freeman:

Mr. Bush vowed in his State of the Union address on Tuesday to achieve a 75-per-cent reduction in U.S. oil imports from the Mideast by 2025 through a renewed commitment to renewable energy and new technologies.

Poor Alan. He must be new at this Bush-watching thing:

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.

I'm betting Alan's going to be the butt of a few jokes around the water cooler this morning.

AFTERSNARK: I'm amused that the Chimpster is even making promises about what the U.S. will be doing by 2025. I'm guessing he actually thinks he'll still be president then, that pesky Constitution thingy notwithstanding.

BONUS TRACK: I'm betting this smackdown from OPEC had a lot to do with Bush's sudden reversal. (Do we dare call it a "flip flop"?)

I love the way the OPEC president warns the U.S. that "energy issues cannot be handled in a unilateral way." That's like your crack dealer telling you that, yes, he understands you want to beat the addiction and stop using but that's not the kind of decision you should be making on your own and that, really, that's the sort of thing that both of you have to discuss together.

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