The day before yesterday, in his State of the Union address, Bush said the following:

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

However, Bush was apparently confused, as his senior advisors corrected him almost immediately:

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 advisor said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

Um, how’s that? He didn’t mean specific percent and date targets literally? How did he mean them? Figuratively? What, is “more than 75%” a metaphor or something? Perhaps “2025” is an allegory regarding some future time.

Didn’t these guys vet the State of the Union, for crying out loud? Their correction didn’t really make it clear, either:

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.

Um, and how is that different, except for replacing “more than 75%” with “most”? Are they scaling it down from 75%+ to anything above 50%? Why? We’re talking twenty years in the future, it’s not like Bush will take any political heat if the numbers are off then. But they tried again to clarify:

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

Well, that clears it up. Like hell. If it were meant to be an example, then an expression like “for example” would have been used. But Bush made it a clearly stated “great goal.” Last I checked, “goals” are not “examples.”

My guess is that the administration took heat from the oil industry, which saw the potential for people to stop investing in them, so Bush’s subordinates released this info just loud enough for the markets to hear but not loud enough for the public to take notice.

Not that any of this matters. To Bush, “alternate energy source” just means a different place to drill for oil. Even if they weren’t already reneging, it’s easy to see that this is yet another of his sound-good-means-nothing proposals that will eventually fade away. The fact that he claimed it loudly one day then had his hacks quietly take it back the next is simply confirmation of this.