Bush breaks own record for disavowal.

Vows to break the “Eight Second Lie” by ‘07!

This is more headshakingly amazing than anything I’ve read in a week. Not shocking. Sadly, not surprising. Just…perfect, in its own small, malignant way.

I just hope the White House doesn’t have it’s own SOTU drinking game: Every time Dubya tells a lie, they all do a shot.

And every time he gets caught, they blow a spy’s cover for spite.

From the Mercury News (emphasis mine.)

Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports

BY KEVIN G. HALL
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - 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.
…

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.
…

Well the lie about "the Middle East" is easy to figure out: the Prezit and his goons are Fear Vampires. They need their pinhead followers to be terrified -- all the time -- lest they every wake up to the fact that the liars and degenerates that lead them are stampeding them over a cliff. So they're never going to miss a change to trot out the "Middle East" bogey man; it's just a reflex to them by now, like cowering behind the troops.

But 75% is a very goddamned specific target, and 2025 is a very goddamned specific year. Each as clear and unambiguous as, say, the Moon, and "the end of this decade" .

When Kennedy set the space program in motion, he didn't mean "well, y'know, someday" or, "Well, maybe not the Moon exactly, but, y'know, everybody knows where the Moon is. And what the President really meant was that we're just shooting for that kinda general area..."

Jesus Christ!

Kennedy was a leader. Kennedy set a real, actual, measurable goal and time limit, and put the energy and focus and resources of the entire federal government behind getting it done. To put men on the Moon, we had to change the country...and we did. We fundamentally changed the school system to crank out more engineers and scientists. We spent real money. We invented whole new technologies that have paid dividends a thousand-fold.

And we did it. By God, yes we did.

But Bush is not a leader.

Bush is a hack; the very model of the dim, detached A.D.D. CEO who gets pumped up about whatever his handlers tell him will sell. What catch-phrase will push product this quarter. He throws a few words at it, takes a few pics, puts some dimwit college pal in charge -- at a fat salary -- who's previous job was cleaning the resin out of the frat house bong collection before the Friday night smoker.

The leader of the Party of Personal Responsibility then wanders away to the next shiny object, orphaning -- sometimes in a matter of mere hours after the Very Important Announcement -- his Very Important Project in the hands of cronies, looters and rich twit friends.

And thus New Orleans and Iraq were lost.

But once upon a time they had a lag of a year or two – or at least a couple of months – during which the conspirators could get their stories straight, or blame Clinton, or cook up some little Reichstag fire to keep their Christalopithecan thralls pissed off and distracted.

Like, say, a war of Christmas.

But now, not 24 hours after Dear Leader Speaks Hour is over, he’s busted slipping the Truth a double-shot of Rohypnol and trying to rip her panties off while she’s passed out.

The State of the Union is the single most prepped-for event in the Presidential calendar. Like your wedding, if you had an unlimited budget, God’s own Rolodex, the full resources of the most powerful government on Earth to draw upon, and hot-and-cold running wordsmiths raking every syllable to perfection like a zen garden.

This was not just another shot-from-the-hip baloney-missile that is daily casually fired over the heads of the press corps by the likes of Scott McClellan, or Big Dick or even Dubya; this was the Presidential Cirque du Soleil, where every moment and pause has been researched and practiced and tested -- and then done all over again – because they know that a thousand cameras and a billion eyes will be watching.

And they lied.

Just stood up and fucking lied.

Again.

And had to retracted it.

Again.

And told us all it was no big deal.

Again.

Right out in front of God and everybody.

And why?

Simple.

Because they are liars, and lying is what liars do. It’s not a whole lot more complicated than that.

Liars make shit up whenever they fucking well feel like it. To cover their asses, or steal from you, or to bullshit you into doing something you would never do otherwise, or just for the hell of it.

And liars only get away with lying when no one will call them on in to their faces and keep calling them on it until they stop.

And that is the magic, little secret that keeps this Administration chugging along when, by all rights, they should be holed up in a Maryland body shop, holding hostages and negotiating the terms of their surrender: that neither the Republican voter nor the main stream press gives a damn anymore that their President is a liar, and that American blood and treasure has been -- and continues to be -- stupidly, recklessly and unforgivably wasted behind his lies.

They care about queers and tax cuts and guns, but wouldn’t pee on the Constitution to save it from burning.

Because in the Dubya Era a person can be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but they can no longer be both.