Bush: Addicted to Empty Rhetoric (Arianna Huffington)

[Up2Late]

Bush: Addicted to Empty Rhetoric

Arianna Huffington
Thu Feb 2, 7:52 PM ET

There is nothing more infuriating than hearing something you passionately believe in -- and indeed have been advocating for years -- cynically co-opted by someone who clearly doesn't mean it. That's why the smoke started pouring out of my ears Tuesday night when President Bush announced: "America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."

How much the president didn't mean anything by his bold statement became crystal clear the day after the State of the Union when his own Energy Secretary, Samuel Bodman, said that the president's call "to make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past" should not be taken literally. Trust me, Sam, I didn't.

Hearing this presidential diagnosis from an oilman starting the sixth year of an administration that has unwaveringly turned the White House into a veritable full-service fueling station for Big Oil -- allowing oil refinery merger after oil refinery merger, doling out billions in tax breaks to energy interests, deriding conservation, and steadfastly refusing to increase fuel-efficiency standards for cars -- was like hearing the makers of the "Girls Gone Wild" videos denounce the coarsening of our culture.

I also wondered if I and my cofounders in the Detroit Project -- Lawrence Bender, Laurie David, and Ari Emanuel -- should ask the White House for a royalty check. Three years ago, we produced a series of TV ads urging American consumers to connect the dots between the cars we drive, our addiction to oil, and our national security.

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