American discourse on foreign issue is extremely sanctimonious - it is more of a morality play to reinforce popular dogmas (whatever they might be) with exotic illustrations. They belong to the same genre as the "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift - they are fictitious tales that use foreign lands and their inhabitants as props to make a moral point at home.
The point of the "crap" you mention is to underscore the value of formal democracy and market capitalism - and most US reporting on foreign affairs falls into that category - including the piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel in "The Nation" that you commented on a few days ago. Katrina was really writing about Bush's Amerika - Russia was but an allegory of despotic tendencies.
Wojtek