" Are we to "understand" that those were "just examples," too?"

Well, let me think hard on this... Yes! And deceptive ones, at that, since he certainly has no intent of doing anything of the sort.

To be fair, not that these guys deserve it, this may be an answer to an objection that most people aren't really aware of.

Cutting the amount of oil we get from the Middle East sounds good to most people. This is because most people assume that most of the oil imported by the US comes from the Middle East. It doesn't. Not even close.

The majority of American oil imports come from Canda and Mexico. In addition, a significant amount of the oil we use is producied domestically. Saudi Arabia is our 3rd largest source of foreign oil, followed by Nigeria, Venezuela, and Angola. Iraq and Kuwait do manage to sneak in near the bottom of the top 10 countries, along with Columbia and Algeria.

Cutting imports from 3 of our top 10 suppliers over a 20 year period would not really be all that impressive, so one would think that the administration would want to make it look like they're actually doing something better than they promised.

On the other hand, we all know that there's just about no chance anything Bush promised in the SOTU is going to happen anyway, so quibbling about the details of his imaginary policies is probably a waste of time.

Since only 10-15% of our total oil supply comes from the Middle East, my first reaction to his statement was that replacing 75% of our Middle East imports with something else doesn't amount to a hill of beans. (Come to think of it, I'm kinda surprised he didn't include a hill of beans when he mentioned the wood chips, stalks and switch grass.)

The first true words spoken by the Bush Administration--

"The president didn't mean what he said in SOTU"

I thought from your title that he was going to admit he didn't mean it when he promised to hire 70,000 new science and math teachers. Though given how much they want to dilute science in the classroom, that's still a disingenuous statement...