Governing By The Seat Of The Pants

From the Washington Post:

The Energy Department said it has come up with $5 million to immediately restore jobs cut at a renewable energy laboratory President George W. Bush will visit on Tuesday, avoiding a potentially embarrassing moment as the president promotes his energy plan.

In his State of the Union speech last month, Bush called for the United States to use less Middle East oil and develop alternative energy sources, including renewable energy such as wind, solar power and biomass.

Bush proposed spending millions more dollars in renewable energy research. However, Democratic lawmakers and environmentalists questioned the administration's commitment when jobs were being eliminated at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.

Bush will visit the lab on Tuesday to tout his proposal for more renewable energy research funding.

I read somewhere that the whole "America is addicted to oil" part of Bush's SOTU speech was added at the last minute in order to give Bush something "positive" to say. This latest act of job restoration at the Department of Energy seems to confirm that this was indeed the case, as does the fact that, one day after the SOTU, BushCo had to issue a retraction wherein the energy secretary and national economic adviser stated that Bush really "didn't mean it" when he vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025.

I mean, if the "addicted to oil" statement really wasn't a last-minute addition, one would think that BushCo would have gotten its ducks in line and restored these jobs before Bush's speech, or would have at least run the whole idea by its energy secretary.

I just think it is pathetic that one of Bush's big political pushes this year will center on an idea that someone in his administration came up with at the last second just to give him something positive to say in his State of the Union speech. That's one hell of a way to run a country.