The President's Admission Of Dark Days Ahead.

President's Bush's State of the Union address contained this passage:

"Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."

After that passage he introduced his plan to develop alternative fuels to run our homes, factories, and automobiles. Fuels that we have here in the US that will free us from depending too much on foreign sources.

The rhetoric of "addiction" is nonsense. America is not addicted to oil. Oil is the fuel we use to run our civilization. We may use more than anybody else and depending on your politics that either means we waste it or we just produce more than anybody else. America is no more addicted to oil than humans are addicted to food.

Leaving that aside, the key phrase in the President's quote is "which is often imported from unstable parts of the world." That the President makes this statement, and then proposes we free ourselves from relying on imports from those regions, is an admission that the Middle East will get worse in the near term before it gets better. Something that is obvious to any reasonably aware observer.

-tdr