Tom Engelhardt writes Premature Withdrawal: Washington’s Cult of Narcissism and Iraq:

We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years.  Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad.  And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded?  In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better.  In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.    

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us.  After all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they’ve done best in recent years: cut one another’s throats?    

Modesty in Washington?  Humility?  The ability to draw new lessons from long-term experience?  None of the above is evidently appropriate for "the indispensable nation," as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called the United States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to "see further into the future."  None of the above is part of the American arsenal, not when Washington’s weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrapheap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us.

An expanding crew of Washington-based opiners are now calling for the Obama administration to alter its plans, negotiated in the last months of the Bush administration, for the departure of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.  They seem to have taken Albright’s belief in American foresight -- even prophesy -- to heart and so are basing their arguments on their ability to divine the future.

The problem, it seems, is that, whatever may be happening in the present, Iraq’s future prospects are terrifying, making leaving, if not inconceivable, then as massively irresponsible (as former Washington Post correspondent and bestselling author Tom Ricks wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed) as invading in the first place.  Without the U.S. military on hand, we’re told, the Iraqis will almost certainly deep-six democracy, while devolving into major civil violence and ethnic bloodletting, possibly of the sort that convulsed their country in 2005-2006 when, by the way, the U.S. military was present in force. ...

In Iraq, only one thing is really known: after our invasion and with U.S. and allied troops occupying the country in significant numbers, the Iraqis did descend into the charnel house of history, into a monumental bloodbath.  It happened in our presence, on our watch, and in significant part thanks to us.

But why should the historical record -- the only thing we can, in part, rely on -- be taken into account when our pundits and strategists have such privileged access to an otherwise unknown future?  In the year to come, based on what we’re seeing now, such arguments may intensify.  Terrible prophesies about Iraq’s future without us may multiply.  And make no mistake, terrible things could indeed happen in Iraq.  They could happen while we are there.  They could happen with us gone.  But history delivers its surprises more regularly than we imagine -- even in Iraq.

In the meantime, it’s worth keeping in mind that not even Americans can occupy the future.  It belongs to no one.

• • • • •

At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:

Until recently, Claude Allen was the Assistant to the President of the United States for Domestic Policy. Allen is, or was, one of the darlings of the religious right led by the likes of James Dobson and his Focus on the Family. Allen was a big abstinence only crusader and led several assaults on AIDS service organizations as well. This paragon of moral values was recruited by Karl Rove. A couple of days ago, Claude Allen was arrested in connection with a massive shoplifter and refund operation.

Tonight's Rescue is brought to you by Got a Grip, ItsJessMe, jlms qkw, Shayera, watercarrier4diogenes, and YatPundit, with ybruti editing.

• zenbassoon focuses on the lives and works of female composers, in Weekly Concert--International Women's Day Edition. (ItsJessMe)
• terryhallinan examines a couple of vehicles powered by heaping piles of...various stuff...in Biomass Is Developing A Head of Steam. (YatPundit)
• hiphoplawyers outlines how corporate influence has led to a culture of Legal Abandon: How Corporate Tort Reform Trashed the Economy. (Got a Grip)
• BorderJumpers tells us about someone who is one of only five opposition voices in a country of thirteen million people, in In Zimbabwe, the Voice of the Worker. (ItsJessMe)
• otto shares the joy of identifying what he loves and then doing it in Teaching is my Life and My Job. (Got a Grip)
• rturner229 shares A tribute to a middle school principal. (shayera)
• MsSpentyouth describes a conversation with a health care consultant, in Q: "Who's your medical provider?" A: Schrödinger's Cat. (ItsJessMe)
• veritas curat ponders the cost of our societal bent toward greed and instant gratification as it pertains to Justice and Population Biology. (Got a Grip)
• In response to veritas curat's diary, vahana unites some hard realities and their possible solutions in "Justice and Population Biology" and HCR. (jlms qkw)

jotter has High Impact Diaries: March 10, 2010.

IrishPatti has tonight's Top Comments Attack of Insomnia Edition.

Please join us in this open thread by suggesting your own favorite diaries from today and sharing the latest news.

Disgusting:

Glaad reports that sponsors have “refused to allow” American figure skater Johnny Weir to join the Stars on Ice Tour because they deemed him “not family friendly.” While Weir — a three-time national champion — has never “officially announced his sexual orientation, he has garnered a significant amount of LGBT fans” and is also known for his flashy costumes. Weir won an online poll that asked fans who they wanted to see in the tour, but Stars on Ice seems to have barred him because of his “perceived sexual orientation”.

And as is so often the case, bigoted homophobes wouldn't know family-friendly if it bit them on the ass:

To say that Weir is “not family friendly” would be a clear jab at his perceived sexual orientation. Weir is extremely involved with his family. He is putting his younger brother through college, and supports the family financially because his father’s disability prohibits him from working. Weir’s dedication to his family can be clearly documented in the Sundance series, Be Good Johnny Weir, which follows him and his family and friends through his life and career as a championship skater.

In case you missed it, the Bunning travesty of last week ended relatively happily yesterday, at least in the big picture of Senate battles.

The Senate approved $140 billion in extended tax breaks and unemployment benefits on Wednesday in a largely partisan vote.

The bill was approved on a 62-36 vote, with six Republicans joining most Democrats in backing it....

Most of the cost in the bill approved by the Senate goes toward prolonging increased levels of federal unemployment aid and COBRA healthcare benefits for the jobless through the end of December. The cost of those extensions is about $80 billion.

The House has some issues with this bill, namely that it doesn't include the infrastructure spending and aid to states and localities that were included in the $154 billion bill passed last December by the House, and that it relies heavily on tax cuts. Reid says he will bring up a jobs bill that includes those measures eventually, but given the pace of the Senate, the House seems skeptical.

As for the bill the Senate just passed, "Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said it’s “an open question” whether House members will force a conference to resolve differences between the two chambers." But what the forward movement on this bill shows is that, at least on jobs, Republican obstruction can be broken.

Greg Sargent gets the results of MoveOn's survey of its membership on whether MoveOn should support passing President Obama's health care reform plan:

Should MoveOn support or oppose the final health care bill if it looks like the plan recently proposed by President Obama?

Support - 83%
Oppose - 17%

That's about as emphatic an endorsement as you're going to see. Now it's up to the House and the Senate to finish up their work and get this thing passed into law.

Happy Birthday to our own John Amato!!! (And as a surprise we got his squeeze to jump out of the cake.)

Open thread below.

Interviewed by Andy Kershaw for the BBC in 1996, and playing Misirlou, which was used in the film "Pulp Fiction."

The Frost/Nixon book by James Reston, Jr. gets a makeover.

When it turned out that Nixon -- "the man who committed the greatest felony in American history" -- was never going to stand trial for his crimes, it fell to journalists to provide the conviction-by-proxy that justice, democracy and the American people so desperately needed.

It is now thirty years after Frost gutted Nixon on national teevee, sparing us (or so we thought) yet another, inevitable Nixonian rise from yet another political grave followed by yet another giddy, fascist Conservative wilding through the streets of America.

But far from having learned from our mistakes, we instead repeated them.

On steroids. And cut with Hulk gamma-irradiated monkey growth hormones.

We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick:

"I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal."

And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail.

Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.

They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.

We must, because if we do not formally, culturally shun them, break with them and come to look back on them forever with horror and shame, they and their imitators and fanboys will fester. And without cleaning and binding up the deep and ugly wound they slashed across our national soul, their disease will continue to rage and rot us from within.

Which brings us to Sunday.

In four days, one of the principle architects of this depraved Administration will be on teevee.

Pimpin' a book.

A book which Media Matters has documented is full of lies.

He will be interviewed for approximately 30 minutes by Famous Journalist, Tom Brokaw.

You perhaps see where I'm going with this...

Rove, of course, is a known quantity; a conscienceless thug who would be rotting in prison cell over in the Better Universe.

But we don't live in the Better Universe. We live here, which means this is about Tom Brokaw.

If he has any reporter left in him at all, on Sunday he has a chance to do some old-fashioned, journalistic public service flogging. He has been handed on a platter of the finest Sterling the opportunity to do what none of us out here in the cold, bloggy world will ever even come close to getting a shot at: demanding answers from Karl Rove face-to-face. To act as an advocate on behalf of the public's right to know. To honorably "afflict the comfortable" and restore a small portion of the trust which the Fourth Estate has spend the last few decades frittering away so easily and cheaply; an cynical erosion of one of the most critical, load-bearing pillars of democracy that reached its nadir during the Age of Bush.

If he has any reporter left in him at all, he can help to lay the Foundations of History on which the judgments of future generations will rest.

If not -- if Tom Brokaw lets this oily little Judas slip through his fingers in the name of the clubby, malignant courtesy that elitist Villager insiders habitually extend to their lodge brothers, then the the best and possibly last opportunity to bring Karl Rove to some kind of public book for his crimes against democracy will have passed.

And like that...

...he'll be gone.

Which gives us just a few, short days to email, blog, Twitter and in every other way we know how contact Tom Brokaw and NBC and let them know that "We The People" are tired of having a Freedom of the Press for which so many millions of Americans have fought and died used a puke funnel for everything from the tribulations of drunken celebrities to long-discredited Neocon drivel, but never for anything so genuinely vital to the survival our democracy as holding some of its worst predators to account for their predations.

On your marks.

Get set...

Cross-posted from here.

By Lauren Reichelt. Crossposted from Tikkun Daily. The delightfully wacky HCR (Health Care Reform) circus caravan rolls on. As of March 11, 41 Senators had either signed or issued statements of support for a letter to Harry Reid initiated by Alan Grayson and the PCCC urging passage of the Public Option through reconciliation. For [...]

This post first appeared on Food Politics. Corporations go to a lot of trouble to neutralize potential critics.   Recent examples: two co-optations (McDonald?s alliance with Weight Watchers and PepsiCo?s with the Yale School of Medicine) and one aggression (Disney?s forced expulsion of the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood from Harvard). Co-optation is the winning over or neutralization of [...]

The first of the President?s three meetings today on immigration is in the books, and this one was a little unexpected. This afternoon at the White House, a group of pro-reform immigrant advocates were slated to meet with senior White House staff regarding the need for immigration reform, but the President showed up to [...]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

OXFORD, MS – The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit today against a Mississippi High School that has canceled prom rather than let a lesbian high school student attend the prom with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo to the event. In papers filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, the ACLU asks the court to reinstate the prom for all students at the school and charges Itawamba County School District officials are violating Constance McMillen’s First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

“All I wanted was the same chance to enjoy my prom night like any other student. But my school would rather hurt all the students than treat everyone fairly,” said McMillen, an 18-year-old senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi. “This isn’t just about me and my rights anymore – now I’m fighting for the right of all the students at my school to have our prom.”

Today’s filing comes after Itawamba County School District issued a statement yesterday saying they were canceling prom, following a letter from the ACLU and the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition demanding that they reverse their decision. McMillen said that before that happened, school officials had told her that she could not arrive at the prom with her girlfriend, also a student at IAHS, and that they might be thrown out if any other students complained about their presence at the April 2 event.

“Itawamba school officials are trying to turn Constance into the villain who called the whole thing off, and that just isn’t what happened. She’s fighting for everyone to be able to enjoy the prom,” said Kristy Bennett, Legal Director of the ACLU of Mississippi. “The government, and that includes public schools, can’t censor someone’s free expression just because some other person might not like it.”

In today’s legal complaint, the ACLU asks the court to reinstate the prom for all students and charges that the First Amendment guarantees students’ right to bring same-sex dates to school dances and cites cases holding that other parties’ objections don’t justify censorship. The ACLU also said that the school further violates McMillen’s free expression rights by telling her that she can’t wear a tuxedo to the prom.

“It’s shameful and cowardly of the school district to have canceled the prom and to try to blame Constance, who’s only standing up for herself. We will fight tooth and nail for the prom to be reinstated for all students,” said Christine P. Sun, Senior Counsel with the ACLU national LGBT Project, who represents McMillen along with the ACLU of Mississippi.

The ACLU will ask the court in the next few days to grant McMillen a preliminary injunction ordering the school to reinstate the April 2 prom, let McMillen and her girlfriend go to the prom together, and let McMillen wear a tuxedo to the event.

McMillen is represented by Bennett and Sun, as well as by Norman C. Simon and Joshua Glick of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP.

The case name is Constance McMillen v. Itawamba County School District, et al. Also named as defendants are Superintendent Teresa McNeece and Itawamba Agricultural High School Principal Trae Wiygul and Vice Principal Rick Mitchell. Additional information, including a copy of today’s legal complaint, is available at http://www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights/fulton-ms-prom-discrimination. There is also a Facebook group for people who want to support McMillen, “Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom,” at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Let-Constance-Take-Her-Girlfriend-to-Prom/357686784817.