'Oil addiction' clarified, but Bush fuel choice is top secret

Friday, February 03, 2006

Editors of the Duluth News Tribune offered the following humorous take on Bush's end of addition proclamation:

Maybe the president meant "Earl," as in "My Name is Earl," one of the hottest new sitcoms of the year.

Maybe what President Bush really said Tuesday during his State of the Union speech was "America is addicted to Earl," not oil, as newspapers across the nation reported. "Earl is imported from unstable parts of the world," the president was trying to say.

That makes sense: The TV show is filmed in Los Angeles. California is well known for its earthquakes, mudslides and other natural disasters. Doesn't get much more unstable than California.

And that also explains why backpedaling White House staffers insisted Wednesday the prez had been misunderstood. Yes, they said, he set a national goal of replacing more than 75 percent of oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. But what he intended to say was alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil equivalent to most of what the U.S. imports from the Middle East. The U.S. would continue to import oil from the Middle East because that's where most of the Earth's oil is located. The president only used the words "Middle East," they further explained, to dramatize the energy issue in a way "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands."

Good thing they cleared that up because for a moment W was sounding like another W, Willie Nelson, who in Duluth last August topped off his tour bus tank with biodiesel. Similarly, Gov. Tim Pawlenty is never shy about his use of E-85 ethanol fuel in his state-provided SUV.

What the Bush motorcade filled up on during the president's visit to Duluth in 2004 or to metro suburban Maplewood yesterday is classified, Secret Service Special Agent in Charge John Kirkwood told the News Tribune's editorial page. As a matter of national security, that information is "protection related," he explained. Yet while Kirkwood's response was pending, the White House e-mailed a fact sheet further clarifying the State of the Union speech. The second sentence read: "The President has set a national goal of replacing more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

So much for the spin attempts. Earl, a character whose mission in life is to make all the bad things he did right, couldn't have explained it clearer.