Since Bush announced he'd speak to the nation tonight to shore up support on the Iraq debacle, I've been thinking about what bothers me most about the war, the public's reponse to it and the current administration.

For me, it comes down to ideology. It's not about facts, it's not about quotes, it's not even about right and wrong. Since the beginning its been about ideology and the idea that America can and should police the world and promote freedom where it seems best by whatever means seem best.

Now that the smoking gun has been revealed, the world knows the Bush administration fixed the facts to build the case to go to war. But a lot of us don't care because if we buy into his ideology it doesn't matter that he took the moral low-ground there. The country can and should do what it wants to protect its interests abroad. We don't need an excuse.

It's the same reason his administration can paint those who oppose the war as anti-American. Those people clearly don't buy into the adminsitration's ideology and thus don't buy into the administration's America (nevermind that essentially what makes us American is the ability to question our government's actions and motives).

And clearly the Iraq invasion was supposed to fit under the war on terror. But that doesn't hold water anymore because we know Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, didn't have WMDs, nor did he sanction al Qada within his borders. So the administration has gone on to use the excuse that reform in the Middle East will turn the tide on the war on terror and has to start somewhere so what better place than a free and democratic Iraq. I won't argue with that.

But. Like Tom Friedman has argued time and again, if the U.S. was really interested in reforming the Middle East, on Sept. 12 Bush should have created an energy policy that completely reduced our dependency on foriegn oil. Where do you think these people get their money? I mean really. Even Billy Madison could figure that out. But on Sept. 12 Bush was instead talking about invading Iraq.

So, now we find ourselves in a mess clearly of our own making. If we don't stay and see that it gets cleaned up then we really do have a threat to our national security. But look at what our misguided, fumbling attempt to exert our power and authority in the world has done and what it will almost certainly continue to do: weaken our country's economy, Army and national unity -- the three things that really do make us vulnerable to outside attacks.

And here's me at the piano with my oldest, Claire. She's an increbible piano player.

Well, now that posting photos has become so easy, I'll post a few of mine. First, the fam.

The time to return to Mazatlan has come. It's been far too long, with far too many excuses. The time to go is now. When I was learning Spanish down there, all the members and my investigators would tell me, "tienes que hablar como un perico" and "querer es poder." Well speaking like parrot has nothing to do with this current situation but the fact that wanting equals being able to do, does. I will find the money, I will arrange the trip, I will make it work because I want to go back. It's been too long. And I don't wnat to hear that it won't be the same, that everything will be different now doesn't matter. It's Mazatlan and I want to go back.

Only because I love Frank Rich. Rich wrote about Watergate and drew the obligitory parrallels to the current administration and its regard for the media. Here's a couple quotes:

"In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These neo-Colsons (White House counsel for Nixon) easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers."

But here's my favorite:

"'The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before' was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it...

"The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon."