Screw America is apparently what Newsweek/National Journal’s Stuart Taylor thinks the President should do:

President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers. (It would be unseemly for Bush to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney or himself, but the next president wouldn’t allow them to be prosecuted anyway—galling as that may be to critics.) The reason for pardons is simple: what this country needs most is a full and true accounting of what took place.

And then the next President should be complicit in the coverup:

The incoming president should convene a truth commission, with subpoena power, to explore every possible misdeed and derive lessons from it. But this should not be a criminal investigation, which would only force officials to hire lawyers and batten down the hatches.

As Sadly, No, puts it:

Yeah, I’m sure Gonzo, Addington and Yoo will be totally willing to tell you the truth about everything if you just promise them that we’ll throw the whole concept of justice down the shitter just to keep them feeling comfortable.

See, Stuart Taylor is laying the groundwork not only for W’s pardoning of every criminal in his administration, but also the partisan attack on Obama if he doesn’t defend W’s actions.  I’ve been worried about exactly that since Obama started looking like a viable candidate, and share Sadly, No’s take, unfortunately:

The sad thing is: I know Obama will do exactly as Taylor recommends. Except he won’t even bother to set up the fucking bogus-assed truth commission. Just sweep this shit under the rug and enjoy his newfound powers to issue warrantless wiretaps and torture orders. Oh, and be sure to give special immunity to people like Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockfeller, who should also be tossed in the Hague for being complicit in all this bullshit. This isn’t about partisanship, peeps — it’s about restricting the ability of our political class to behave in the most reckless and lawless ways imagineable. If we don’t want to degenerate into a damn banana republic, we have to demonstrate that we won’t let our most powerful politicians get away with breaking the laws they’ve sworn to uphold.

I don’t think Obama would continue the torture, but otherwise, I’ll lay a marker down on this – this is exactly what will happen, barring huge public pressure to the contrary.  And we all know how reliable the American public is when it comes to matters of actual moral import.