I think Obama understands, at a deep instinctive level, that a campaign of revenge and punishment against the far Right will have just the opposite effect that would be hoped for. It would turn the Bush Gang into permanent victims and martyrs, transform them into oppressed underdogs, vessels for sympathy and excuses from their apologists. It is best that they be left to the cold eye of history, and that they continue to condemn themselves by their own words. Obama has a job to do, not a mission to perform.

Cheney may have been "a very powerful and evil man", but now he is just evil. His incompetence, intransigence and arrogance have forever disgraced him and his partisans and discredited their philosophy, exposing it for the foul and elitist sham it really is. The Neocons have played their last and best card, and it has come up short, revealing their entire world view as spiritually barren, morally bankrupt, and intellectually desolate.

The damage he and his tribe have inflicted on the nation's public life is incalculable, not only affecting their liberal critics, but the vast majority in the center, and even conservatives of good will. The moderate and thoughtful in his own party will have to pay the greatest price for the excesses of the Cheneys and their friends and apologists, and suffer the most for their treachery.

So let them rant, and point fingers, let their shrill screed issue forth from the wilderness. Better that way so we don't forget them, or those who share their grim vision of humanity and life. The longer we hear their chittering obscenities the better we will remember their legacy. For they will not go away. They and their kind are always with us, and always will be, they are as old as Babylon and they are legion. Selah.