Why'd Bush bother to speak to the nation (opposite, ironically, the fluff movie about his role during 9/11 on Showtime) when he didn't have any news he could twist to his benefit (the only other times he's taken a few minutes to talk to us)?

I don't think it was the polls, I think he knew that he can't ram $87 billion more onto the deficit ($600 billion! Whoopee!!) through Congress without positioning the issue before the spending debate begins.

And how did he position the war in Iraq tonight? The NY Times has a distrubingly good analogy,

....(Bush) made the Middle East what Southeast Asia was to the nation of his youth: a place where dominoes could not be allowed to fall, where a vicious ideology could not be permitted to take hold and spread....

and the paper of record reminds us of echoes of other paranoid times;

.....Just as in the cold war, when presidents from Truman to Nixon argued that America was the target of Communists, Mr. Bush said, "We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today, so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities."

With that phrase, he fully merged the challenge of the occupation of Iraq with the terrorism of Al Qaeda, even though his own intelligence agencies found no link between Mr. Hussein and the conspirators of Sept. 11. Now, in a post-Iraq world, Mr. Bush is saying that link makes no difference — the arrival of terrorists blowing up Americans in Baghdad and Tikrit in the postwar period have turned this into a single war.

So we'll commit to another $87 billion (anyone think any of the Dem candidates will advocate not spending the $$, and pulling out???), have 130,000 + troops there for the long haul, and hope that attacks diminish over time.

If that doesn't make us safer -- what next?