"One day after President Bush [3] vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil [4] 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," Knight-Ridder's Kevin Hall reports. "What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters [5], 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." In his State of the Union [6] address, Bush spelled it out: "America is addicted to oil." Why did Bush call to "break this addication" to Middle East oil when he didn't really mean it? "[O]ne administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that 'every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands," Hall writes, adding, "The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble."