Boldly going where we've already gone before?

The next big frontier for the US space program is apparently going to be the moon. Again.

I'm tremendously disappointed in this decision and am still hoping that we end up changing the plan and doing something more useful.

Don't get me wrong, a permanent moon base would be an exciting new frontier, but we aren't fully utilizing the capabilities we already have. That's the ultimate example of why I think this plan is such a bad idea. We've spent billions getting the ISS built. The Space Shuttle program is only barely going to last long enough to get the ISS finished. Yet already funding for the experiments on board the ISS is being cut in order to direct money to new projects.

Why bother spending so much money building the damned thing if we're going to start slashing funding before it's even finished? The ISS is a research platform. We're supposed to be using it to run experiments. But now we're to believe that the moon is going to be the next research project, and that we'd learn so much from a permanent base there.
How about making the most of what we have now first before galloping off somewhere else? I feel like a parent telling a child that he shouldn't get a new toy since he doesn't play with the one he already has.

The thing is, the Apollo program was a bold effort. On some (well, MANY) levels it was a part of the cold war, but it was also an intensive scientific and technical venture. It cost a lot of money, but it resulted in the development of many new technologies. It's like the saying about a trip and getting there being half the fun. It wasn't walking on the moon, it was what it took to get there that made it all worthwhile.

I'm just not sure that doing it over again, only with the addition of a permanent base that is supposed to have some bearing on a Mars mission, is really the best way to proceed considering the limited resources we're willing to spend on space exploration.

About the Mars mission, the attempt to link a moon base with Mars goes something like this:

The moon might have water buried beneath the surface in the form of ice. If we can put a base on the location of this ice and dig into it, we could mine the ice. The point isn't the water in an of itself, but what can be done with it. If you pass an electrical current through water you can split it into its component elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Which just happen to be a common choice for liquid rocket fuel.

The suggestion is that you could make space travel more affordable by fueling up outbound spacecraft on the moon. But I fail to see that as being any tremendous advantage. Yes, you could launch the vehicles from the Earth without them being fully fueled, weight reduction equals cost reduction. But the biggest effort is just getting out of Earth's atmosphere. Once you're in orbit you're halfway there. I may be oversimplifying this some, the more reserve fuel you have the faster you can get to more distance destinations. But the thing is if you launch vehicles without enough fuel, you still have to give them enough fuel for the transfer to lunar orbit. You'd also have to design them to land on the moon, or else you'd need a separate fuel ferry to lift the fuel up to the orbiting craft.

I admit, I haven't seen the numbers on the advantage this would confer, but it doesn't seem that it should be significant enough to be worth this overly elaborate plan. To me it reads more like a plan designed to appeal to science fiction enthusiasts who've grown up on stories where the moon functions as a spaceport.