Yes, Bush has seen the light: America's "addicted" to oil. Sure, He's coming round to this view just a little late, but the reality-based community is always happy to welcome new members, however belated the may be. But, based on past history, I have just a tiny bit of skepticism about the, erm, thoroughness of his latest conversion experience. AP:

President Bush on Tuesday acknowledged that Washington has sent "mixed signals" to one of the nation's premiere labs studying renewable energies — by first laying off, then reinstating, 32 workers just before his visit.

What's mixed about this? It was probably simpler to rehire the workers than to change Bush's schedule, and anyhow, we'll check in a year and see if they still have jobs....

Bush blamed the conflicting message on an appropriations mix-up in funding the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is developing the very renewable energy technologies the president is promoting.

"Part of the issue we face, unfortunately, is that sometimes decisions made as the result of the appropriations process, may not end going to where it was supposed to have gone.

Leave aside Bush's twisted notion that "the appropriations" process has no role to play in where money goes (see Article 1 of the Constitution). And leave aside the covert appeal to the Authority of Dear Leader to solve the problem. What else leaps out of this paragraph?

Bush isn't taking responsibility again! It's never hHis fault! Nothing is ever hHis fault!

And that's where Bush's Dry Drunk syndrome comes in. As Ari Emanuel points out in the Huffington Post:

Watching Bush choke on his carefully-parsed acceptance of responsibility, it hit me that what we need is a 12-step program for presidents addicted to shirking hard truths. Forget impeachment, we need an intervention!

On the upside, Bush already claims to have accepted a Higher Power in his life (and no, I'm not talking about Karl Rove), so unless this is another fabrication, he's already got a good half of AA's 12 steps down cold (step 3: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him," step 6: "Were entirely ready to have God remove all defects of character").

The real challenge will be the aforementioned step 10 and its cousin, step 4 ("Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"). You see, the president is a classic dry drunk -- one who has kicked the bottle without ever dealing with the root causes of his addiction. And a hallmark of a dry drunk is an intense aversion to introspection and a pathological aversion to owning up to, well, anything.

So, until Bush gets to step 10, all we're really going to get from Him is "Honey, I've changed!" And, surrounded by enablers (Condi, Karen, Karl) as He is, that's hardly likely

So, no matter how much talk we get from Bush on addiction to anything we're never going to get any walk at all. Bush is going to be able to help America kick it's addiction to oil exactly as much as he's been able to kick his alchoholism: Not at all.