There was a graduation in LambertLand this past weekend. Son #2, AKA Weasel #2, picked up his diploma after enduring a pablum-marinaded commencement speech apparently written for a group of fourth graders but mistakenly delivered to several hundred 22-year-old adults just finishing four years of training in critical thinking. But I digress. The inflow of relatives—can you say four runs to MSP International in one day?—plus all the fine (backyard) dining cut into my bloviating time. So much so that that bastard, what's his name Rich at The New York Times, anticipated my latest deep thought.

Rich's Sunday piece—always a sprawling good read—left the station on the topic of Obama's inability to duck the growing furor over various Bush administration offenses against law and logic. Soon though, it was darting off on spur lines. Like the one involving that blockbuster Robert Draper piece on Donald Rumsfeld, "And He Shall Be Judged" in the latest GQ. Then there was another, my favorite episode of appalling big media hypocrisy. This is the TV networks' lockjaw and blackballing of any reporting on Rich's Times colleague David Barstow's Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of those bought-and-paid for Pentagon generals. You remember, the ones every network used during the Iraq invasion to provide gullible, patriotic Americans with honest, tough-minded assessments . . . of how great the war was going.

If you missed Glenn Greenwald's take on how the TV networks avoided any mention of their
malfeasance, look here.

Anyway . . . Obama's predicament regarding the Bush administration is fascinating. And as Rich points out, it doesn't look like he's going to be able to suppress this stuff. Not with the rising tide of demands for actual legal accountability on whichever Bush bungle/crime you regard as most egregious: torture, the U.S. attorneys scandal, Cheney's energy commission, Wall Street deregulation, the clamping down on SEC investigations, or, my personal favorite, the "intelligence" that drove the invasion of Iraq.

The official Obama position has been: "We've got too many other super-sized problems that need our full attention." And that is true, and I certainly don't want them spending another minute worrying about their predecessors' reputations.

But we don't live in a world where information such as the next round of photos from Abu Ghraib—pictures that Seymour Hersh has speculated may include the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy and the like—can by suppressed by some piddly Presidential decree, especially if the President in question isn't of a mind to back up the decree with some heavy-handed Dick Cheney/Tom DeLay-style threats.

Accepting this—and maybe knowing it all along—I seriously believe Obama, and Rahm Emanuel, are building a case where they can credibly say, "Look, our position has been clear for months. We've got other things to do. But we're not going to interfer with legal processes that rise up outside of our agenda. What will happen will just have to happen. That's life."

The key here is wiki-transparency, which is what needs to happen with that next round of Abu Ghraib photos and whatever is left in the Bush administration torture well (which is probably a lot). In the old days, the established media could always be controlled with flattering phone calls from the President to Henry Luce or the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post arguing, you know, "national security." But those days are over. In the wild, wooly world of the Internet, the public wiki world now decides what it wants to see and know, not a handful of clubby publishers

On the matter of Abu Ghraib and torture, this is undeniably a very good thing. With FoxNews-like outlets such as Al Jazeera pumping out anything that infuriates (i.e. builds) its audience, there is no real hope of controlling or mediating the message of this stuff. It will emerge, the zealots will be roused to new heights of passion, more cultish followers will volunteer for suicide bombing missions, etc., etc.

The only way to mitigate the next round of violent reaction is to demonstrate—publicly and widely—to the anti-American crowd that the big dogs who launched this stuff are now taking their beating.

Obama's best move here—despite the reckless mono-mania of most American media, which has such a difficult time concentrating (disappearing) resources on two things at a time—is to just let a lot of this stuff happen. Lord knows all of our allies, and by that I mean the majority of their populations, understand that they're dealing with a 180 sea change from January 19.

But the wiki-transparency concept, where heretofore hidden schemes and policies of total importance to millions, are instead laid out for anyone to read, analyze, and comment on, is a rapidly building meme in our digital world. I mean, how do you stop something when you know with high likelihood that eventually you'll be ID'd as . . . the guy who stopped it?

The March issue of Wired (my favorite magazine) featured a piece by Daniel Roth titled, "The Road Map for Recovery: Radical Transparency Now!" in which he argued that the solution to avoiding another deregulated, unsupervised, off-the-public-books meltdown on Wall Street is simply to put all the trading, Shanghai-subsidiary, derivatives-floating, and Swiss-banking information of every public company on the Internet—in language understandable to any stakeholder (that's you and me) to analyze in real time. And the faster we get to this point, the better.

Arguments that too much proprietary information would be released, creating competitive disadvantages, ring pretty damned hollow in the wake of everything we now know about Bernie Madoff and the furious flow of insider information between the likes of Goldman Sachs and AIG.

The processes of statecraft and investment need a serious upgrade to 21st-century wiki realities.