Billmon, excellent as always, on how the Cheney administration is about to be flushed down the memory hole:

You can see this in just about all of the transition coverage. Reporters (like the ones responsible for the journalistic abomination above) and columnists and pundits are busy cranking out the usual lame duck legacy stories, as if this were the “normal” end of a “normal” presidency, instead of the concluding chapter of a national tragedy.

There is just a yawning disconnect between the nature of the crimes allegedly committed (and, in many cases, essentially admitted): waging aggressive war, torture, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy — to the point where it would probably take an army of Patrick Fitzgeralds and a full-time war crimes tribunal a year just to catalogue them all — and how the story is being treated in the corporate media.  

It’s not quite Pravda — at least some of the hard questions are being asked, if only half-heartedly — but it still has  some of the same barely concealed, everybody-knows-even-though-we-are-not-allowed-to-say quality of Soviet discourse in the USSR’s terminal Potemkin Village phase. It’s as if keeping up the pretense — observing the customary rituals as handed down by the priests of High Broderism — is all most of the press corpses know how to do any more, or care to do.

And, as in late Soviet times, the absurdity of the official story line is only reinforced by the other systemic failures that surround it: in our case, financial collapse, plunging asset prices, massive fraud and a corrupt, sclerotic political system that may be incapable of doing even the most simple, obvious things (like printing and spending sufficient quantities of fiat money) to stave off an deeper downward spiral.

This being the case, I have a strong hunch the political-media complex (i.e. the Village) is going to want to move fairly quickly to the post-Soviet solution I described earlier — skipping right over the perestroika and glasnost to get directly to the willful amnesia and live-in-the-moment materialism of mid-1990s Russia.

Which means, in turn, that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Feith and the whole noxious crew are about to get flushed straight down the memory hole: banished fairly quickly from public discussion and corporate media coverage — in much the way the Iran-Contra scandal (go ahead, Wiki it) was almost immediately forgotten or ignored once it became clear that the fix was in. America apparently had its big experiment with truthtelling and reform in the post-Watergate era, and the experience was so unpleasant that nobody (or nobody who counts) is willing to go there again.

He blames the press for this, but I don’t know that the public on the whole has the stomach for it either. We’ve already been through the live-in-the-moment materialism - that defined the 2000s. We’re now out on the other side of it. In a sense, it’s a time of national reckoning, or ought to be. But it won’t be. And that, I think, is as most people want it.